In 1925-26, the future Nobel prize-winner Max Born presented two series of lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of one on the structure of the atom, the other on the lattice theory of rigid bodies. This volume contains the text of every lecture from both series, offering a remarkable look at the transition from the quantum theory of Bohr to a new direction in atomic dynamics. "At the time I began this course of lectures," Born writes, "Heisenberg's first paper on the new quantum theory had just appeared. Here his masterly treatment gave the quantum theory an entirely new turn. The paper of Jordan and myself, in which we recognized the matrix calculus as the proper formulation of Heisenberg's ideas, was in press, and the manuscript of a third paper by the three of us was almost completed." In the course of the lecture series, Born introduced new developments as they Pauli's fourth quantum number, Dirac's formalism, and elements of his own work on a general operational calculus. Appropriate for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, Problems of Atomic Dynamics represents the foundations of quantum theory and offers a vivid look at science in the making, presenting clear-cut results that have withstood decades of experimentation.
Max Born (was a German-British physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 30s. Born won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with Walther Bothe).
He used time, talent and heart Such went his life among us And far from great speeches, from great theories To his task each day, one could say of him He changed life
He was a professor, a simple professor Who thought knowledge was a great treasure That all the nobodies only had to get through School and the right of anybody to get instruction