Max Planck

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, FRS (; 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 contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame as a physicist rests primarily on his role as the originator of quantum theory, which revolutionized human understanding of atomic and subatomic processes. In 1948 the German scientific institution the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (of which Planck was twice president), was renamed the Max Planck Society (MPS). The MPS now includes 83 institutions representing a wide range of scientific directions. 2Early life and career 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 baptized 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 "appellation 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 marriag