Only child of Gustav Born[?] and Margarete Kauffmann[?].
Initially educated at the König-Wilhelm-Gymnasium, he went on to study at the University of Breslau[?] followed by Heidelberg University[?] and Zurich University[?]. During this period he came into contact with many prominent scientists and mathematicians including Klein, Hilbert, Minkowski, Runge[?], Schwarzschild, and Voigt[?].
In 1909 he was appointed a lecturer at the University of Göttingen where he worked until 1912 when he moved to work at Chicago University[?]. In 1919 after a period in the German army he became a professor at the University of Frankfurt-on-Main[?] and in 1933 due to the anti-Semitic government activity at the time he went to lecture at Cambridge University and Edinburgh University.
His published works include Dynamics of Crystal Lattices and Zur Quantummechanik. He was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for Physics, the Stokes Medal[?] and the 1950 Hughes Medal[?].