--- title: Google Doodle Celebrates German Quantum Physicist Max Born description: Google Doodle honors German physicist, mathematician and Nobel laureate Max Born on what would be his 135th birthday canonical: https://time.com/5058077/google-doodle-max-born-nobel/ author: Casey Quackenbush article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2017-12-11T08:38:02.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:47:24.498Z og:title: Google Doodle Honors German Quantum Physicist Max Born og:description: The Nobel laureate transformed the way scientists make predictions og:url: https://time.com/5058077/google-doodle-max-born-nobel/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0cb4a3033a7e9d3e/6988f48a929fad7c94beece2/max-borns-135th-birthday-6605540930093056-2x.png?branch=production&width=818&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 818 og:image:height: 460 og:image:alt: max-borns-135th-birthday-6605540930093056-2x og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Google Doodle Honors German Quantum Physicist Max Born twitter:description: The Nobel laureate transformed the way scientists make predictions twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0cb4a3033a7e9d3e/6988f48a929fad7c94beece2/max-borns-135th-birthday-6605540930093056-2x.png?branch=production&width=818&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Google Doodle Honors Nobel Laureate Max Born, the Famed German Quantum Physicist > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=01a268de-5c72-4a6b-bdbf-e4ac5c40e31f&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: How Google Makes its Doodles [Watch (HLS stream): How Google Makes its Doodles](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/upF0qp1E.m3u8) (3:23)  _Published 2018-07-07. Our videographer went to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California to meet some of the designers and coders who create the special, clever variations on the Google.com logo known as_ by [Casey Quackenbush](https://time.com/author/casey-quackenbush/) ## Casey Quackenbush Dec 11, 2017 8:38 AM UTC  Today's Doodle celebrates the 135th birthday of Max Born, German physicist and mathematician who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the field of quantum mechanics. Today's Doodle celebrates the 135th birthday of Max Born, German physicist and mathematician who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the field of quantum mechanics. Kati Szilagyi/Google Images by [Casey Quackenbush](https://time.com/author/casey-quackenbush/) ## Casey Quackenbush Dec 11, 2017 8:38 AM UTC German physicist and mathematician Max Born, awarded a Nobel Prize for his contributions to quantum physics, is seen hunched happily over a flurry of textbooks and scribbled equations in Monday’s [Google Doodle](https://www.google.com/doodles/max-borns-135th-birthday). The illustration honors what would be his 135th birthday. The 1954 laureate is most famous for establishing the Born rule, a theory that uses mathematical probability — rather than exact equations — to predict the location of wave particles in a quantum system. Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics that examines nature at the atomic level. The field has led to the development of major technologies such as lasers, computers and MRIs. Born’s theory revolutionized the basis of quantum mechanics predictions and ultimately transformed technology as we know it today. Worked with several other renowned mathematicians, Born earned his Ph.D. from Germany’s Göttingen University in the early 1900s. Of Jewish descent, he served as a professor of theoretical physics there until he had to flee Nazi Germany in 1933\. For the next twenty years he worked as a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. In 1954, Born returned home to Göttingen to retire. Born continued his scientific work through retirement until his death in 1970 at age 87. ## Transcript >> The Doodle team was able to meet Ira Glass from This American Life, and he was just meeting us for fun. I guess, I'm not even sure why he was here, but we talked about potentially collaborating and they thought that it'd be fun to collaborate with us on Valentine's Day, so I took the lead on this project. >> We do Valentine's Day pretty much every year, and we've done your typical like lovebirds and, you know, flowers and things like that. But Ira and his team are awesome. >> They were able to pull stories that they have collected over the years, they've recorded new stories for us, and they're all about love in all different respects of the word. They sent us maybe 8 or 10 stories and they're all really fun and really sweet. >> The stories run the [ unk ]. There is a story about middle school love. >> I was in the cafeteria, just got on a drink of root beer and she walks up to me. >> There is a story about a new bride who's in doubt that she made a mistake. >> My husband, me and I, we're just so worried, his face I could tell. I said, " Where he could be ," you know, and I-- and I called the police because I thought he got lost or something happened. >> When I first got the audio from Ira, my co- worker and I listened to it together and we wrote down bullet points of where we wanted to have a little drawing come up. >> One of my favorite stories, it involves middle schoolers. We're titling it, " Puppy Love" so true to the title, I just-- I just drew everyone as a dog. >> Each stories are-- containing a little candy heart. >> And when you click on it, the heart will flip, the audio will play and you will also see the images that we've drawn to accompany the phrases. So, now we are all going to brainstorms together because we need the creative side and we also need the technical side to tell us what is possible and what isn't possible. For this one, it's a pretty conservative on the interactive side, because we didn't want to overshadow the audio. When I first started, they were no engineers on the team, we only did static doodles, but since then, we've started doing more animated stuff, more interactive work, and for that we needed a dedicated team. >> Some of our most like ambitious to those have come from engineers that are just incredibly talented and spare similar time for our projects. >> Sometimes the illustrators will come up with an idea that is way too wacky and just not possible yet. The technology hasn't been invented, but sometimes we're too conservative and it's great to have the engineers there to tell us that we can actually be way wackier with our ideas. The relationship with my engineer on this was to just keep my files size at a reasonable capacity, I was getting a little bit ambitious with how many frames I wanted to draw and my engineers said, " Hey, you need to double it ." >> We tried to do as many doodles as we possibly can. We're a pretty small team, relative to how many audiences are out there [ unk ], but yeah, we-- you never know what you're gonna get. 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