Max Born - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Max Born was born on 11 December 1882 in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), which at Born's birth was in the Prussian Province of Silesia in the German Empire, to a family of Jewish descent. He was one of two children born to Gustav Born (b. 22 April 1850, Kempen, d. 6 July 1900, Breslau), an anatomist and embryologist, and Margarethe ('Gretchen') Kauffmann (b. 22 January 1856, Tannhausen, d. 29 August 1886, Breslau), from a Silesian family of industrialists.

Gustav and Gretchen married on 7 May 1881. She died when Max was four years old, on 29 August 1886.

Max had a sister Käthe (b. 5 March 1884), and a half-brother Wolfgang (b. 21 October 1892) from his father's second marriage (m. 13 September 1891) with Bertha Lipstein.

Initially educated at the König-Wilhelm-Gymnasium, Born went on to study at the University of Breslau followed by Heidelberg University and the University of Zurich. During study for his Ph.D. and Habilitation at the University of Göttingen, he came into contact with many prominent scientists and mathematicians including Klein, Hilbert, Minkowski, Runge, Schwarzschild, and Voigt. In 1908-1909 he studied at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

When Born arrived in Göttingen in 1904, Klein, Hilbert, and Minkowski were the high priests of mathematics and were known as the “mandarins.” Very quickly after his arrival, Born formed close ties to the latter two men. From the first class he took with Hilbert, Hilbert identified Born as having exceptional abilities and selected him as the lecture scribe, whose function was to write up the class notes for the students' mathematics reading room at the University of Göttingen. Being class scribe put Born into regular, invaluable contact with Hilbert, during which time Hilbert’s intellectual largesse benefited Born’s fertile mind. Hilbert became Born's mentor and Hilbert eventually selected him to be the first to hold the unpaid, semi-official position of Hilbert’s assistant. Born's introduction to Minkowski came through Born's stepmother, Bertha, as she knew Minkowski from dancing classes in Königsberg. The introduction netted Born invitations to the Minkowski household for Sunday dinners. In addition, while performing his duties as scribe and assistant, Born often saw Minkowski at Hilbert's house. Born’s outstanding work on elasticity – a subject near and dear to Klein – became the core of his magna cum laude Ph.D. thesis, in spite of some of Born’s irrationalities in dealing with Klein.

Born married Martha E. Hedwig, née Ehrenberg, on 2 August 1913. She was of Jewish background on her father's side and Christian on her mother's side, and was a practicing Lutheran; Born converted from Judaism to the Lutheran faith in 1914. Though he converted to the Lutheran faith, however, he regarded religious professions and churches to be no importance to him. He was said to be a deist. The major reasons for his conversion was for his wife and to assimilate into German society. The marriage produced three children, including G. V. R. Born. His daughter Irene was the mother of British-born Australian singer and actress Olivia Newton-John. Via marriage, he is related to jurists Victor Ehrenberg (his father-in-law) and Rudolf von Jhering (his wife's maternal grandfather), as well as Hans Ehrenberg, and is a great uncle of British alternative comedian Ben Elton.