We were [initially] entirely in Heisenberg's footsteps. He had the idea that one should take matrices, although he did not know that his dynamical quantities were matrices.... And when one had such a programme of formulating everything in matrix language, it takes some effort to get rid of matrices. Though it seemed quite natural for me to represent perturbation theory in the algebraic way, this was not a particularly new way.

        ---Max Born

The Historical Development of Quantum Theory, Vol. 3: The Formulation of Matrix Mechanics and Its Modifications, 1925-1926 by Jagdish Mehra and Helmut Rechenberg, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1982, p. 129, footnote 146. In Mehra and Rechenberg's system of reference to transcriptions of taped conversations, this quote is cited as: Born, Conversations, p. 48.

This quote is used as an epigraph on p. 330 in Operator Commutation Relations by Palle E. T. Jorgensen and Robert T. Moore, D. Reidel, Dordrecht / Boston / Lancaster, 1984.

Some interesting links for Max Born:
     Born [in the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive at the University of St Andrews]
     Max Born Winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics
     Surprises in Writing a Biography of Max Born by Nancy Greenspan

I guess the pioneers in quantum theory have more representation on the web than most pure mathematicians.

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