The German physicist Werner Heisenberg was born in Würzburg; he studied physics in Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld and received his doctorate from Munich in 1923. Heisenberg became a lecturer and assistant to Max Born at Göttingen in 1924. He continued his studies at the University of Copenhagen, where he collaborated with H. A. Kramers. He succeeded Kramers in 1926 as lecturer in physics there. Heisenberg was professor of physics at Leipzig from 1927 to 1941 and professor at Berlin and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics from 1941 to 1945. He was named honorary professor and director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics at Göttingen in 1946 and served as honorary professor and administrative director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Munich from 1958 to 1970. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1932.

Heisenberg's contributions to physics are contained in more than...