Max Born

German mathematician and physicist

• Born: December 11, 1882; Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland)
• Died: January 5, 1970; Göttingen, Germany

Max Born’s work in quantum mechanics earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954. He taught numerous other physicists who eventually won the Nobel Prize, many of whom were instrumental in the development of atomic fission. Like his close friend Albert Einstein and other Jewish scientists, he fled from Germany’s Nazi regime in the early 1930s.

Primary field: Physics

Specialty: Quantum mechanics

Early Life

Max Born was born on December 11, 1882 in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland). His father Gustav was a physician, and his grandfather was a professor of embryology at the University of Breslau. His mother, Margarete Kaufmann, was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist and was known for her musical talent. Max had one sister, Käthe, who was born in 1884. His mother died in 1886, after which his father remarried.

The family’s wealth gave Born access to a good education. As a teenager, he attended Kaiser Wilhelm Gymnasium. As in most senior secondary schools intended to prepare students for college, the principal emphasis of the curriculum was Latin and other ancient language studies (philology) and mathematics. Young Born was a satisfactory but not exemplary student, and he was an accomplished pianist. In 1901, having completed his studies at the school and passed the Abitur (a required college entrance exam), he entered the University of Breslau as a philosophy major, a track that also included studies in mathematics and science.

As was common at the time, Born would attend summer semesters at other universities. In 1903 he studied in Zurich, where he attended lectures by famed mathematician Adolf Hurwitz, known for his command of algebraic number theory. The following year, he studied at the Georg-August University of Göttingen, renowned for its emphasis on science and mathematics.

Born’s careful note-taking won him the post of transcriptionist for David Hilbert, and he went on to become his full assistant, helping the professor prepare lectures. Hilbert had begun his career in the 1890s with influential works in algebraic number theory and geometry, but his later work with integral equations led him to abstract mathematical concepts such as infinite dimensional vector spaces, later known as Hilbert Space. Such concepts helped form the mathematical foundation of quantum mechanics.

Born’s doctoral thesis on the stability of the elastic line (the stability of elastic wire or strips of metal) won him the philosophy department’s faculty prize in 1906. After further exams he earned his PhD in mathematics. He returned home to Breslau, but was quickly conscripted into the German army, as required by law, for one year’s service in Berlin. He was released early due to an asthmatic condition.

Born studied for one term in England at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, under physics professor J. J. Thomson, who had just won the Nobel Prize in Physics in recognition of his discovery of the electron in 1897.

Life’s Work

Returning to Breslau, Born worked as an assistant to physics professors Otto Lummer and Ernst Pringsheim, former associates of Max Planck, whose Nobel Prize–winning work in thermodynamics would also presage quantum theory. Planck’s public support of the research of young physicist Albert Einstein drew Born’s attention.

In late 1908 he returned to Göttingen with the hope of eventually becoming a professor. After the death of mathematician Hermann Minkowski in early 1909, Born spent the next few years organizing the late professor’s papers. During this period, he also lectured on new concepts of relativity at the University of Chicago and conducted research at Göttingen using Fourier analysis to determine lattice dynamics in crystals. This area of research later became commonly known as solid-state physics.

In 1913, Born married Hedwig Ehrenberg, the daughter of Göttingen University law professor Victor Ehrenberg. The couple had one son, Gustav, and two daughters, Irene and Margarethe.

In late 1914, with World War I looming, Planck invited Born to teach at the University of Berlin. But after Germany declared war against Russia and France in August, Born was again conscripted into the German army. Nonetheless, he was still able to publish his first book, Dynamics of Crystal Lattices, in 1915. The book was the culmination of his research on lattice dynamics, along with a discussion of related thermal and optic properties. He issued an expanded edition in 1954, coauthored with University of Beijing professor Kun Huang.

On November 11, 1918, Germany signed an armistice with the Allied forces. In 1919, Born accepted a position as a physics professor at the University of Frankfurt. One of his assistants was Otto Stern, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics 1943.

In 1921, Born won his most desired post: physics professor at the University of Göttingen. Despite lingering political turmoil, Germany in the 1920s was the focal point of worldwide growth in the popularity and influence of physics, as highlighted by Einstein’s Nobel Prize in 1921.

Born first worked on refining the mathematics of the principles of conservation of energy (the first law of thermodynamics). In 1924, he published Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Intended as a popular explanation of physics from its origins through the advances of the early 1900s, it was a distillation of his lectures from the decade prior to his return to Göttingen.

In the mid-1920s Born focused on the use of statistical interpretation to describe the properties and behavior of energy and matter at atomic and subatomic levels. Along with his student and assistant Werner Heisenberg, he determined that precise measurements of subatomic particles in both time and space (momentum and position) were impossible, but could be mathematically approximated using matrix algebra. This effort became known as quantum mechanics (Born is often credited with first use of that term during this period), in reference to the mechanics of quanta, a term for subatomic particles such as photons that are “light quanta.”

At the same time, Erwin Schrödinger expressed similar results using a wave function. Born and Heisenberg’s matrix method is known as the first formulation of quantum theory; the wave method as the second formulation. Heisenberg initially garnered greater recognition for these efforts than Born, and was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for “the creation of quantum mechanics.”

Born was recognized for his approximation methods for describing the behavior and properties of molecules, including the distorted-wave Born approximation (DWBA) to determine electron scattering, the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, and the distorted Born iterative method (DBIM).

Born wrote thousands of letters to fellow scientists, most notably in regular correspondence and debate with Einstein. In a letter to Born in 1926, Einstein stated his belief that “[God] doesn’t play dice with the universe.” Although they were not practicing Jews, for generations Born’s family had faced anti-Semitism and pressure to rescind their Jewish heritage in Germany. Conditions for German Jews worsened after the Nazis came to power in 1930. After Adolf Hitler became German chancellor in 1933, Born fled to Italy and then moved to England, becoming the Stokes Lecturer of Applied Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

He published a treatise on optics called Optik in 1933, and further expounded on the subject in Principles of Optics: Electromagnetic Theory of Propagation, Interference and Diffraction of Light (1959), which he coauthored with Emil Wolf. The work became a principal textbook on the mathematical aspects of optics.

Born published Moderne Physik in 1933, which was translated into English as Atomic Physics in 1935. Another popular textbook, it describes gases, particles, atoms, the wave theory of light, and atomic and molecular structure. Born updated the work through numerous editions to include new developments related to quantum theory and elementary particles.

After spending six months at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, he accepted the position of Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 1936, where he continued teaching mathematical physics. He became a British citizen in 1939.

Born’s later works include Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance (1949) and Physics in My Generation (1956), both of which drew from his lectures and correspondence. He retired in 1953 and returned to Germany. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics the following year. In retirement, he organized a group of scientists to protest the use and development of nuclear weapons. He died in Göttingen on January 5, 1970.

Impact

Born’s work with his scientific colleagues Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan on the matrix approach to quantum mechanics is one of two approaches on which modern quantum theory is based and helped establish the field of quantum mechanics. His statistical solution to Schrödinger’s mechanical wave calculation united the old and new quantum theories and helped lead to other advances in quantum mechanics, such as the Copenhagen interpretation and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. His many accomplishments also include other key contributions to quantum mechanics, such as his approximations, as well as the work he did earlier in his career, such as his development of the atomic theory of crystals, which formed the basis for modern solid-state physics.

Born is remembered as a teacher of many of the great figures of the atomic age, including Nobel Prize-winners Heisenberg, Enrico Fermi, Otto Stern, Wolfgang Pauli, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, and Eugene Wigner, along with Manhattan Project scientists J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and John von Neumann.

Bibliography

Born, Max. The Born-Einstein Letters, 1916–55: Friendship, Politics, and Physics in Uncertain Times. New York: Macmillan, 2005. Print. Presents forty years’ worth of correspondence between the two scientists and friends.

---. My Life: Recollections of a Nobel Laureate. New York: Scribner, 1978. Print. Presents Born’s autobiography.

Greenspan, Nancy Thorndike. The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born, the Nobel Physicist Who Ignited the Quantum Revolution. New York: Basic, 2005. Print. Gives an empathetic view of Born’s life and work.