Max Laue was born on October 9, 1879 at Pfaffendorf, near Koblenz.

In 1898 he left school and for a year did his military service. He then went to the University of Strassburg where he studied mathematics, physics and chemistry; but soon he moved to the University of Göttingen, where he worked under Professor W. Voigt and Professor W. Abraham, who greatly influenced him.

After a term at the University of Munich he went, in 1902, to the University of Berlin to work under Professor Max Planck (famous for the Planck's constant). After obtaining his doctorate at Berlin in 1903, von Laue spent two years at the University of Göttingen. In 1905 he was offered the post of assistant to Max Planck at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Berlin. In 1909 he went as Privatdozent to the University of Munich, where he lectured on optics, thermodynamics and the theory of relativity and in 1912 he became Professor of Physics at the University of Zurich.

In 1958 he retired and in 1959 his 80th birthday was celebrated in Berlin-Dahlem.

His best known work, for which he received the Nobel Prize for Physics for 1914, was his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays on crystals. Von Laue worked out the mathematical formulation of it and published it in 1912. It established the fact that X-rays are electromagnetic in nature and it opened the way to the later work of Sir William and Sir Lawrence Bragg

Sadly, on April 8, 1960, when he was driving alone to his laboratory, a motor cyclist, who had only received his licence two days previously, collided with von Laue's car. The motor cyclist was instantly killed and von Laue's car overturned on the Berlin speedway. Although he showed at first some signs of recovery from his injuries, he died of them on April 24, at the age of 80.

 

X-RAYS  - HISTORY  - MAX VON LAUE  - WILLIAM H. BRAGG  - WILLIAM L. BRAGG  - PRINCIPLES

 

 

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