Werner Karl Heisenberg was born on 5 December 1901 in Würzburg, Germany. A physicist and philosopher, he formulated quantum mechanics in terms of matrices and developed the uncertainty principle. Lecturer in Theoretical Physics at Copenhagen and Leipzig in 1926 and 1927, he was appointed Professor of Physics at Berlin and Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in 1941. Heading the German efforts in nuclear fission during the Second World War, he was taken prisoner by an American military intelligence team, returning to Germany in 1946 to organise the Max Planck Institute for Physics. He became Professor of Theoretical Physics at Munich in 1958.
Awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1932, he made important contributions to the theories of hydrodynamics of turbulent flows, ferromagnetism, cosmic rays, and subatomic particles. He was instrumental in planning the first West German nuclear reactor in 1957. Important works include The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory (1930), Reality and Its Order (1942), Nuclear Physics (1953), Physics and Beyond (1969), Across the Frontiers (1974), and Encounters with Einstein (1989) and My Dear Li: Correspondence 1937–1946 (2016), posthumously published.
