Max Born

Education

Max Born was born on 11 December 1882 in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), Germany, into a family of Jewish descent. He was one of two children of anatomist and embryologist Gustav Jacob Born, who was Professor of Embryology at the University of Breslau, and Margarethe Gretchen Kauffmann, who came from a Silesian family of industrialists. Margarethe died on 29 August 1886, when Max was age four. He had a sister, Käthe, who was born in 1884, and a half-brother—Wolfgang—from his father's second wife, Bertha Lipstein. Wolfgang later became Professor of Art History at the City College of New York.

Initially educated at the König-Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Breslau, Born entered the University of Breslau in 1901. The German university system allowed students to move easily from one university to another, so he spent summer semesters at Heidelberg University in 1902 and the University of Zurich in 1903. Fellow students at the University of Breslau, Otto Toeplitz and Ernst Hellinger, told him about the University of Göttingen, and he went there in April 1904. At Göttingen he found three renowned mathematicians: Felix Klein, David Hilbert, and Hermann Minkowski. Very soon after his arrival, he formed close ties to the latter two men. From the first class he took with Hilbert, Hilbert identified him as having exceptional abilities and selected him as the lecture scribe, whose function was to write up the class notes for the students' mathematics reading room at the University of Göttingen. Being class scribe put him into regular, invaluable contact with Hilbert. Hilbert became his mentor after selecting him to be the first to hold the unpaid, semi-official position of assistant. Born's introduction to Minkowski came through his stepmother, Bertha, as she knew Minkowski from dancing classes in Königsberg. The introduction netted him invitations to the Minkowski household for Sunday dinners. In addition, while performing his duties as scribe and assistant, he often saw Minkowski at Hilbert's house.

Born's relationship with Felix Klein was more problematic. He attended a seminar conducted by Klein, Carl Runge, and Ludwig Prandtl on the subject of elasticity. Although not particularly interested in the subject, he was obliged to present a paper. He presented one in which, taking the simple case of a curved wire with both ends fixed, he used Hilbert's calculus of variations to determine the configuration that would minimise potential energy and therefore be the most stable. Klein was impressed, and invited him to submit a thesis on the subject of "Stability of Elastica in a Plane and Space" – a subject near and dear to Klein – which Klein had arranged to be the subject for the prestigious annual Philosophy Faculty Prize offered by the university. Entries could also qualify as doctoral dissertations. He responded by turning down the offer, as applied mathematics was not his preferred area of study. Klein was greatly offended.

Career and research

Berlin and Frankfurt

Born settled in as a young academic at the University of Göttingen as a Privatdozent. In Göttingen, he stayed at a boarding house run by Sister Annie at Dahlmannstrasse 17, known as El BoKaReBo. The name was derived from the first letters of the last names of its boarders: "El" for Ella Philipson (a medical student), "Bo" for Born and Hans Bolza (a physics student), "Ka" for Theodore von Kármán (a Privatdozent), and "Re" for Albrecht Renner (another medical student). A frequent visitor to the boarding house was Paul Peter Ewald, a doctoral student of Arnold Sommerfeld, on loan to Hilbert at Göttingen as a special assistant for physics. Richard Courant, a mathematician and Privatdozent, called these people the "in group."

In 1912, Born met Hedwig (Hedi) Ehrenberg, the daughter of a Leipzig University law professor, and a friend of Carl Runge's daughter Iris. She was of Jewish background on her father's side, although he had become a practising Lutheran when he got married, as did his sister Käthe. Despite never practising his religion, he refused to convert, and his wedding on 2 August 1913 was a garden ceremony. However, he was baptised as a Lutheran in March 1914 by the same pastor who had performed his wedding ceremony. Born regarded "religious professions and churches as a matter of no importance." His decision to be baptised was made partly in deference to his wife, and partly due to his desire to assimilate into German society. The marriage produced three children: two daughters, Irene, born in 1914, and Margarethe (Gritli), born in 1915, and a son, Gustav, born in 1921. Through marriage, he is related to jurists Victor Ehrenberg, his father-in-law, and Rudolf von Jhering, his wife's maternal grandfather, as well as to philosopher and theologian Hans Ehrenberg, and is a great uncle of British comedian Ben Elton.

By the end of 1913, Born had published 27 papers, including important work on relativity and the dynamics of crystal lattices (3 with Theodore von Karman), which became a book. In 1914, he received a letter from Max Planck explaining that a new professor extraordinarius Chair of Theoretical Physics had been created at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin. The chair had been offered to Max von Laue, but he had turned it down. Born accepted. The First World War was now raging. Soon after arriving in Berlin in 1915, he enlisted in an Army signals unit. In October, he joined the Artillerie Prüfungskommission, the Army's Berlin-based artillery research and development organisation, under Rudolf Ladenburg, who had established a special unit dedicated to the new technology of sound ranging. In Berlin, he formed a lifelong friendship with Albert Einstein, who became a frequent visitor to Born's home. Within days of the armistice in November 1918, Planck had the Army release Born. A chance meeting with Fritz Haber that month led to discussion of the manner in which an ionic compound is formed when a metal reacts with a halogen, which is today known as the Born–Haber cycle.

Göttingen

For the 12 years Born and Franck were at the University of Göttingen (1921–1933), Born had a collaborator with shared views on basic scientific concepts, a benefit for teaching and research. His collaborative approach with experimental physicists was similar to that of Arnold Sommerfeld at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, who was Ordinarius Professor of Theoretical Physics and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics—also a prime mover in the development of quantum theory. Born and Sommerfeld collaborated with experimental physicists to test and advance their theories. In 1922, when lecturing in the United States at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Sommerfeld sent his student Werner Heisenberg to be Born's assistant. Heisenberg returned to Göttingen in 1923, where he completed his habilitation under Born in 1924, and became a Privatdozent there.

In 1919 and 1920, Born became displeased about the large number of objections against Einstein's relativity, and gave speeches in the winter of 1919 in support of Einstein. He received pay for his relativity speeches which helped with expenses through the year of rapid inflation. The speeches in the German language became a book published in 1920 of which Einstein received the proofs before publication. A third edition was published in 1922 and an English translation was published in 1924. He represented light speed as a function of curvature, "the velocity of light is much greater for some directions of the light ray than its ordinary value c, and other bodies can also attain much greater velocities."

In 1925, Born and Heisenberg formulated the matrix mechanics representation of quantum mechanics. On 9 July, Heisenberg gave Born a paper titled Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen (Quantum-Theoretical Re-interpretation of Kinematic and Mechanical Relations) to review, and submit for publication. In the paper, Heisenberg formulated quantum theory, avoiding the concrete, but unobservable, representations of electron orbits by using parameters such as transition probabilities for quantum jumps, which necessitated using two indexes corresponding to the initial and final states. When Born read the paper, he recognised the formulation as one which could be transcribed and extended to the systematic language of matrices, which he had learned from his study under Jakob Rosanes at the University of Breslau.

Up until this time, matrices were seldom used by physicists; they were considered to belong to the realm of pure mathematics. Gustav Mie had used them in a paper on electrodynamics in 1912, and Born had used them in his work on the lattices theory of crystals in 1921. While matrices were used in these cases, the algebra of matrices with their multiplication did not enter the picture as they did in the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics. With the help of his assistant and former student Pascual Jordan, he began immediately to make a transcription and extension, and they submitted their results for publication; the paper was received for publication just 60 days after Heisenberg's paper. A follow-on paper was submitted for publication before the end of the year by all three authors. The result was a surprising formulation:

Later life

In January 1933, the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. In May, Born became one of six Jewish professors at Göttingen who were suspended with pay; Franck had already resigned. In twelve years, they had built Göttingen into one of the world's foremost centres for physics. Born began looking for a new job, writing to Maria Goeppert Mayer at Johns Hopkins University and Rudi Ladenburg at Princeton University. He accepted an offer from St John's College, Cambridge. At Cambridge, he wrote a popular science book, The Restless Universe, and a textbook, Atomic Physics, that soon became a standard text, going through seven editions. His family soon settled into life in England, with his daughters Irene and Gritli becoming engaged to Welshman Brinley (Bryn) Newton-John and Englishman Maurice Pryce respectively. Born's granddaughter Olivia Newton-John was the daughter of Irene.

Born's position at Cambridge was only a temporary one, and his tenure at Göttingen was terminated in May 1935. He therefore accepted an offer from C. V. Raman to go to Bangalore in 1935. Born considered taking a permanent position there, but the Indian Institute of Science did not create an additional chair for him. During his residency in Bangalore, Born worked with mathematician B. S. Madhava Rao on Born's nonlinear electromagnetic field theory; Madhava Rao's doctoral thesis and eight published papers in the Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences were a direct product of this collaboration. On 18 March 1936, at the close of his residency, Born signed and dated a studio portrait taken by Cyril Studio, Bangalore — a personal gift to Madhava Rao that is now preserved in the Madhava Rao family archive. In November 1935, the Born family had their German citizenship revoked, rendering them stateless. A few weeks later Göttingen cancelled Born's doctorate. Born considered an offer from Pyotr Kapitsa in Moscow, and started taking Russian lessons from Rudolf Peierls's Russian-born wife Genia. But then Charles Galton Darwin asked Born if he would consider becoming his successor as Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, an offer that Born promptly accepted, assuming the chair in October 1936.

In Edinburgh, Born promoted the teaching of mathematical physics. He had two German assistants, Ernst Walter Kellermann and Klaus Fuchs, and one Scottish assistant, Robert Schlapp, and together they continued to investigate the mysterious behaviour of electrons. Born became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1937, and of the Royal Society in March 1939. During 1939, he got as many of his remaining friends and relatives still in Germany as he could out of the country, including his sister Käthe, in-laws Kurt and Marga, and the daughters of his friend Heinrich Rausch von Traubenberg. Hedi ran a domestic bureau, placing young Jewish women in jobs. Born received his certificate of naturalisation as a British subject on 31 August 1939, one day before the Second World War broke out in Europe.

Global policy

He was one of the signatories of the agreement to convene a convention for drafting a world constitution. As a result, for the first time in human history, a World Constituent Assembly convened to draft and adopt a Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

Family

Born's wife Hedwig (Hedi) Martha Ehrenberg (1891–1972) was a daughter of the jurist Victor Ehrenberg and Elise von Jhering (a daughter of the jurist Rudolf von Jhering). Born was survived by his wife Hedi and their children Irene, Gritli and Gustav. Singer and actress Olivia Newton-John was a daughter of Irene (1914–2003), while Gustav is the father of musician and academic Georgina Born, actor Max Born (Fellini Satyricon) and filmmaker Carey Born who are thus also Max's grandchildren. His great-grandchildren include songwriter Brett Goldsmith, singer Tottie Goldsmith, racing car driver Emerson Newton-John, and singer Chloe Rose Lattanzi. Born helped his nephew, architect, Otto Königsberger (1908–1999) obtain a commission in the Mysore State.

Recognition

Commemoration

1972: Max Born Medal and Prize was created by the German Physical Society and the Institute of Physics. It is awarded annually.

1982: Ceremony at the University of Göttingen in the 100th Birth Year of Max Born and James Franck, Institute Directors 1921–1933.

1991: Max-Born-Institut für Nichtlineare Optik und Kurzzeitspektroskopie – Institute named in his honor.

11 December 2017: Google showed a Google doodle, designed by Kati Szilagyi, in honouring the 135th birth anniversary of Born.