This week, the Dog is passing along a favorite piece of trivia. It concerns a person from an extraordinarily intellectually accomplished family.
Our story begins in 1882 with the birth in Breslau, Germany of Max Born. Born, who had a famous correspondence with Albert Einstein, made major contributions in his own right to quantum mechanics, solid-state physics and optics. In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. But I’m getting ahead of the story.
Born married Hedi Ehrenberg, who came from a distinguished family of her own. Her father Victor was a noted law professor at the University of Leipzip, Her grandfather Rudolph van Jhering has been called “the father of sociological jurisprudence.”
In 1933, when the Nazi Party came to power, Born was fired from his job. He and Hedi emigrated to England with their nineteen year old daughter Irene. Irene later fell in love with a man name Brinley who served as an intelligence office. Brinley worked on building the Enigma machine, the secret project used to break the German military code during World War II. And in 1941, when Hitler’s deputy fuhrer Rudoph Hess flew to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate a peace deal, Brinley reportedly was the man who apprehended him. After the war, Brinley became a professor of German at the University of Melborne.
Brinley and Irene had a daughter who grew up to have a career of her own. Was she a physicist? A law professor? An cryptographer? A linguist? Can you guess who she is?
Click the link below to see her in action.
Today, she is very much in our thoughts as she recently announced that she is battling metastatic breast cancer. We wish her the best.
I guessed correctly. Another singer related to physicists is Joan Baez, who dad was prominent Mexican-American physicist Albert Baez.
Weirdly, after Max Born was fired, he got a letter from Hitler thanking him for his service.