Max Born

Max Born (German: Max Born, December 11, 1882 - January 5, 1970) was a German theoretical physicist and mathematician who made important contributions to the development of quantum mechanics and also made achievements in solid-state physics and optics. In addition, he trained a large number of well-known physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1954, Born won the Nobel Prize in Physics for "fundamental research in the field of quantum mechanics, especially the statistical interpretation of the wave function." Born in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) in the German Empire in 1882, Born entered the University of Göttingen in 1904. There he completed his thesis on Thomson's atomic model. In 1918, he and Fritz Haber discussed the process by which metals and halogens form ionic compounds. This mechanism was later named the Born-Haber cycle. During World War I, Born was first appointed as a radio operator and then turned to research on acoustic positioning technology. In 1921, Born returned to Göttingen and for more than ten years led Göttingen to become one of the physics research centers at that time. In 1925, Born and Werner Heisenberg jointly proposed the matrix mechanics expression of quantum mechanics. The next year, he gave an interpretation of the probability density function that later became the academic standard for ψ*ψ in the Schrödinger equation. He received the Nobel Prize in 1954 for this achievement. During his time in Göttingen, Born also promoted many underachievers and cultivated a large number of well-known physicists. After the National Socialist German Labor Party (the Nazi Party) came to power in January 1933, Born, who is Jewish, was suspended from his job. He immediately moved to England and took a position at St. John's College, Cambridge. In October 1936, Born became Tate Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. After his retirement, he moved to Bad Pyrmont, West Germany, and died in hospital in Göttingen on January 5, 1970.