Max Planck
Max Planck | |
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Planck in 1938 | |
| Born | Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck 23 April 1858 |
| Died | 4 October 1947 (aged 89) |
| Resting place | Stadtfriedhof, Göttingen |
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| Spouses | Marie Merck
(m. 1887; died 1909)Marga von Hösslin (m. 1911) |
| Children | 5, including Erwin |
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| Thesis | Über den zweiten Hauptsatz der mechanischen Wärmetheorie (On the second principles of mechanical heat theory) (1879) |
| Doctoral advisor | Alexander von Brill |
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Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (/ˈplæŋk/; German: [maks ˈplaŋk] ⓘ; 23 April 1858 – 4 October 1947) was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.
Planck made many substantial contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame as a physicist rests primarily on his role as the originator of quantum theory and one of the founders of modern physics, which revolutionized understanding of atomic and subatomic processes. He is known for the Planck constant, which is of foundational importance for quantum physics, and which he used to derive a set of units, today called Planck units, expressed only in terms of fundamental physical constants.
Planck was twice president of the German scientific institution Kaiser Wilhelm Society. In 1948, it was renamed the Max Planck Society (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft) and nowadays includes 83 institutions representing a wide range of scientific directions.