Born, Max

German-born British physicist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1954 for fundamental work on the quantum theory, especially his 1926 discovery that the wave function of an electron is linked to the probability that the electron is to be found at any point.

In 1924 Born coined the term ‘quantum mechanics’. He made Göttingen a leading centre for theoretical physics and together with his students and collaborators – notably Werner Heisenberg – he devised in 1925 a system called matrix mechanics that accounted mathematically for the position and momentum of the electron in the atom. He also devised a technique, called the Born approximation method, for computing the behaviour of subatomic particles, which is of great use in high-energy physics.