Google Doodle celebrates physicist Max Born's 135th birth anniversary

Google celebrates the 135th birthday of Max Born, a German physicist and mathematician who discovered an important rule in quantum mechanics, with a doodle, created by guest artist Kati Szilagyi. He was also awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the field of quantum mechanics.

Born earned his Ph.D. at Göttingen University where he later became a professor of theoretical physics, collaborating with and mentoring some of the most famous scientists of the time. In 1933 he was forced to flee Germany for England, where he served as the Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh for nearly two decades until his retirement in 1954 when he returned home to Göttingen.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954 for the Born Rule — a quantum theory that uses mathematical probability to predict the location of wave particles in a quantum system. Previous theories proposed that wave equations were exact measurements, involving cumbersome physical measurement experiments. A mathematician, Born discovered that matrices or “arrays of numbers by rows and columns” could yield a similar result, relying on predictions of probability. This theory now provides the basis for practically all quantum physics predictions. Born moved to Göttingen in Germany in his last years and passed away on January 5, 1970.