Sonntag, 5. Januar 2014

Max Born 

* 11. Dezember 1882 in Breslau    
† 5. Januar 1970 in Göttingen

Deutsch-Britischer Mathematiker, Physiker und Nobelpreis-Träger.

Born was born to a family of Jewish descent. He was one of two children born to an anatomist and embryologist, who was a professor of embryology the University of Breslau, and his wife from a Jewish family of industrialists. 

Initially educated at the König-Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Breslau, Born entered the University of Breslau in 1901. He spent the summer semesters at Heidelberg University in 1902 and the University of Zurich in 1903. In April 1904, Born went to the University of Göttingen. At Göttingen he found three renowned mathematicians: David Hilbert , Felix Klein and Hermann Minkowski . Hilbert became Born's mentor after selecting him to be his first assistant. In 1907 Born was awarded his PhD in mathematics. His military service was brief, as he was discharged early after an asthma attack in January 1907. He then travelled to England, where he studied physics for six months at the Cavendish Laboratory. He then returned to Breslau, where he worked under the supervision of Ernst Pringsheim . 

In 1905, Albert Einstein published his paper On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies about special relativity. Born was intrigued, and began researching the subject. Minkowski asked him to return to Göttingen and do his habilitation there. But Minkowski died suddenly in January 1909. Hilbert was interested in Born's work, and on 23 October Born presented his habilitation lecture on the Thomson model of the atom. In 1912, Born met Hedwig Ehrenberg, the daughter of a University of Leipzig law professor. His wedding on 2 August 1913 was a garden ceremony. However, he was baptised as a Lutheran in March 1914. The marriage produced three children.

  
In 1915 Born obtained the chair of theoretical physics which had been created at the University of Berlin. Soon after arriving in Berlin, he enlisted in an Army signals unit. In Berlin, Born formed a lifelong friendship with Einstein. In April 1919 Born became professor ordinarius and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics on the science faculty at the University of Frankfurt am Main and later at the University of Göttingen.

  
In 1925, Born and Heisenberg formulated the matrix mechanics representation of quantum mechanics. On 9 July, Heisenberg gave Born a paper entitled '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 recognized the formulation as one which could be transcribed and extended to the systematic language of matrices.

With the help of his assistant and former student Pascual Jordan , Born 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. The paper put Heisenberg's speculations on a solid mathematical basis. Born was surprised to discover that Paul Dirac had been thinking along the same lines as Heisenberg. In 1928, Einstein nominated Heisenberg, Born, and Jordan for the Nobel Prize in Physics, but Heisenberg alone won the 1932 Prize, while Schrödinger and Dirac shared the 1933 Prize.  
 
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. Born began looking for a new job, and he accepted an offer from St John's College, Cambridge. His family soon settled into life in England. Born's position at Cambridge was only a temporary one, and his tenure at Göttingen was terminated in May 1935. In November 1935, the Born family had their German citizenship revoked, rendering them stateless. In October 1936, Born accepted a chair of mathematical physics in Edinburgh. He had two German assistants, E. Walter Kellermann and Klaus Fuchs .

Born received his Certificate of Naturalisation as a British subject in August 1939. He remained at Edinburgh until he reached the retirement age of 70 in 1952. He retired to Bad Pyrmont, in West Germany, in 1954. In October, he received word that he was being awarded the Nobel Prize for "fundamental research in Quantum Mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function". In retirement, he continued scientific work, and produced new editions of his books. He died in hospital in Göttingen. He is buried in the Stadtfriedhof there, in the same cemetery as Walther Nernst , Wilhelm Weber , Max von Laue , Max Planck , and David Hilbert.  

ABCD   

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