Max Born

Max Born (1882-1970) was a German physicist who helped discover quantum mechanics in the 1920s. His major contribution was the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics. Born was one of two children in a Jewish family to parents Gustav Born and his wife. He was first educated at the König Wilhelm Gymnasium, then at the University of Breslau, then Heidelberg University and then the University of Zurich. He taught theoretical physics at the University of Göttingen during 1921 – 1933. When the Nazi racial laws started taking effect in Germany in 1933 he fled to Britain where he taught principally at the University of Edinburgh from 1936 – 1953.

In 1921 he was able to give a very precise definition of the quantity of heat and the most satisfactory mathematical statement of the law of thermodynamics. Then in 1926 he collaborated with one of his student’s Werner Heisenberg to develop a mathematical formulation that would describe Heisenberg’s first laws of the new quantum theory. This was Born’s most well known work. Born died January 5, 1970 in Göttingen, Germany.