Max Born

Born entered the University of Göttingen in 1904 and fell in with mathematicians Felix Klein, David Hilbert, and Hermann Minkowski, earning his doctorate on elastic stability and later researching special relativity alongside Minkowski. After a wartime stint in sound ranging and a 1918 encounter with Fritz Haber that yielded the Born-Haber cycle, he returned to Göttingen in 1921 and turned it into a physics powerhouse: in 1925 he and Werner Heisenberg formulated matrix mechanics, then the following year Born supplied the now-standard probability density reading of Schrödinger's wavefunction. His students and assistants read like a mid-century physics honor roll - Oppenheimer, Pauli, Fermi, Heisenberg, Teller, Wigner, Goeppert Mayer. When the Nazis took power in January 1933, Born, Jewish by birth, was suspended and emigrated to Britain, teaching at Cambridge and then holding Edinburgh's Tait chair until 1952. He became a British subject one day before the Second World War began, retired to West Germany, and died in a Göttingen hospital in 1970.