Max Born (11 December 1882 – 5 January 1970) was a German-British physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics, winning him the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics. He was the grandfather of English-Australian singer-songwriter and actress Olivia Newton-John.
Biography[]
Max Born was born in Breslau, Silesia, German Empire (now Wroclaw, Poland) in 1882 to a Jewish family. He graduated magna cum laude from Gottingen in 1906, having studied alongside Felix Klein, David Hilbert, and Hermann Minkowski, and he briefly served in the Imperial German Army before an asthma attack led to his discharge. He served as a radio operator during World War I, but he was later moved to research duties regarding sound ranging due to his specialist knowledge. He then returned to Gottingen, which he turned into one of the world's foremost centers for physics. In 1933, the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, and he was suspended from his professorship and forced into exile in the United Kingdom, where he became a professor at St. John's College, Cambridge. He wrote major works, one of which became a standard textbook, and he became a naturalized British subject in 1939. Born remained at Edinburgh until 1952, when he returned to West Germany, and he won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics after formulating the now-standard interpretation of the probability density function in the Schroedinger equation. He died in Gottingen in 1970 at the age of 87.