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Notes

¹ Organised by Dr Liba Taub, Director and Curator of the Whipple Museum for the History of Science and Sara Abdulla of Macmillan Science, publisher of The Born–Einstein Letters (1916–1955), letters originally translated into English by Gustav's sister Irene Born.

² Born found that Joseph Larmor's lectures on electromagnetism ‘taught me nothing I hadn’t already learned from Minkowski, although J J Thomson's experimental demonstrations were splendid and exciting’. Two years later, in 1909, Born gave his Göttingen Habilitation lecture on Thomson's ‘plum pudding’ model of the atom.

³ A family that includes Olivia Newton-John, the singer and actress, as one of Max Born's grandchildren.

⁴ Ferdinand von Lindemann, Hilbert's doctoral thesis supervisor at the University of Königsberg, gave the first proof of the transcendence of π in 1882.

⁵ Born took Klein and Runge's winter 1904/05 seminars on elasticity, and Hilbert and Minkowski's summer 1905 seminars on the theory of the electron.

⁶ When the German government tried to combat inflation by replacing the Mark with the Rentenmark, David Hilbert remarked sceptically, ‘One cannot solve a problem by changing the name of the independent variable.’

⁷ ‘Hilbert [established] the fundamental concepts of the theory of infinite matrices and left the development of details to his collaborators, especially Ernst Hellinger and Otto Toeplitz [Born's friend from Breslau]. In a series of papers they translated [Arthur] Cayley's familiar operations on finite matrices into the new theory.’ (J Mehra and H Rechenberg, The historical development of quantum theory, III, New York: Springer, 1982, 32)

⁸ Wave mechanics was popular with physicists as it used the well-understood differential calculus, rather than the complicated, little-understood matrix mechanics.

⁹ This development gave Hilbert ‘a great laugh’. When Born was struggling to develop the extremely complicated matrix mechanics, he had asked Hilbert for help, but didn’t take his advice to look at the by-product of the eigenvalues of the boundary-value problem of a differential equation. ‘Hilbert had a lot of fun pointing out to them that they could have discovered Schrödinger's wave mechanics six months earlier if they had paid a little more attention to him.’ (Constance Reid, Hilbert, New York: Springer, 1996, 182).

¹⁰ ‘Physics in my Generation’, pp. 182–183, by Max Born.