Max Planck
| Max Planck | |
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Planck in 1933
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| Born | Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck 23 April 1858 Kiel, Duchy of Holstein |
| Died | 4 October 1947 (aged 89) Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | |
| Alma mater | Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich |
| Doctoral advisor |
Alexander von Brill Gustav Kirchhoff Hermann von Helmholtz |
| Doctoral students | |
| Other notable students | Lise Meitner |
| Known for | |
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| Spouse | Marie Merck (1887–1909) Marga von Hösslin (1911–1947) |
Signature
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His son Erwin Planck was executed in 1945 by the Gestapo for his part in the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler.
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Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, FRS (/plɑːŋk/; 23 April 1858 – 4 October 1947) was a German theoretical physicist whose work on quantum theory won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.
Planck made many contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame as a physicist rests primarily on his role as an originator of quantum theory, which revolutionized human understanding of atomic and subatomic processes. However, his name is also known on a broader academic basis, through the renaming in 1948 of the German scientific institution, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (of which he was twice president), as the Max Planck Society (MPS). The MPS now includes 83 institutions representing a wide range of scientific directions.
Planck came from a traditional, intellectual family. His paternal great-grandfather and grandfather were both theology professors in Göttingen; his father was a law professor in Kiel and Munich.
Planck was born in Kiel, Holstein, to Johann Julius Wilhelm Planck and his second wife, Emma Patzig. He was baptised with the name of Karl Ernst Ludwig Marx Planck; of his given names, Marx (a now obsolete variant of Markus or maybe simply an error for Max, which is actually short for Maximilian) was indicated as the primary name. However, by the age of ten he signed with the name Max and used this for the rest of his life.
He was the 6th child in the family, though two of his siblings were from his father's first marriage. Among his earliest memories was the marching of Prussian and Austrian troops into Kiel during the Second Schleswig War in 1864. In 1867 the family moved to Munich, and Planck enrolled in the Maximilians gymnasium school, where he came under the tutelage of Hermann Müller, a mathematician who took an interest in the youth, and taught him astronomy and mechanics as well as mathematics. It was from Müller that Planck first learned the principle of conservation of energy. Planck graduated early, at age 17. This is how Planck first came in contact with the field of physics.
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