Max Born

MAX BORN d1970. German physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. He won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for his "fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function". In January 1933 the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. He was Jewish and was suspended from his professor-ship at the University of Göttingen. He emigrated to the UK where he took a job at St John's College Cambridge and wrote a popular science book ; "The Restless Universe" as well as Atomic Physics which soon became a standard textbook. In October 1936, he became the Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh where working with German-born assistants E. Walter Kellermann and Klaus Fuchs, he continued his research into physics. He became a naturalised British subject on 31st August 1939, one day before WW2 broke out in Europe. He remained in Edinburgh until 1952. He retired to Bad Pyrmont in West Germany and died in hospital in Göttingen aged 87 on 5th January 1970