Born, Max (1882-1970), a German physicist, played a major role in the development of a branch of physics called quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics describes the structure and behavior of atoms and subatomic particles (pieces of matter smaller than atoms).
In the 1920’s, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger showed that the behavior of subatomic particles could be described using the mathematics of waves. At the time, physicists did not know what such waves physically represented. Born said that the wave associated with a particle indicated the probability of finding the particle in a particular place. Born shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in physics primarily for this interpretation. It became the standard method used to interpret quantum mechanics.
Born received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Göttingen in 1907. He was born on Dec. 11, 1882, in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland). He died on Jan. 5, 1970.
