Max Born

Max Born was a German physicist and mathematician who played a key role in the development of quantum mechanics, contributing to developments in solid-state physics and optics.

Born attended university in his home city of Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland). The academic career that followed saw him gain professorships at the universities of Berlin, Frankfurt and Göttingen. He left Germany after the Nazi Party came into power in 1933 and assumed positions at Cambridge and Bangalore in India before finally taking the post of Tate Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, which he held from 1936 to his retirement in 1953.

He supervised the work of several notable physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. He is also known for a series of speeches that he gave in 1919 and 1920 in support of Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity when many other scientists disagreed with him.

Born won numerous prestigious awards during his lifetime, including the 1948 Max Planck Medaille and the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for his ‘fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function’.

Two years after his death the annual Max Born Medal and Prize was created by the German Physical Society and the British Institute of Physics. The singer Olivia Newton-John (1948-2002) was his granddaughter.