Max Born, the son of an eminent physician and medical researcher, was born on December 11, 1882, in Breslau, then a part of Prussia, now known as Wroclaw, Poland. The senior Born was the first to recognize that sex hormones are produced in the corpus luteum. Born's mother died when he was four years old, and his father died in Born's last year of school. Born was married in 1913 to Hedwig Ehrenberg. The pair had three children.

Born attended the universities of Breslau, Heidelberg, Zurich, Cambridge, and Göttingen. He received his doctorate from Göttingen in 1907. After graduation, Born studied with Joseph J. Thomson at Cambridge and lectured at the University of Chicago. He then taught at Göttingen, until 1915, and Berlin and Frankfurt before returning to Göttingen as head of the physics department. During World War I, he served in the German army...