Max Theodor Felix von Laue, German physicist, b. 1879, d. 1960. Before going to university, von Laue did a year of military service. After this, he attended Universities of Strassburg, Göttingen, Munich, and Berlin. He received his doctorate from the University of Berlin in 1903. He then travelled back to Göttingen, and in 1905, was offered a position as an assistant to Max Planck at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Berlin. Following this were positions at the Universities of Munich, Zurich, and Frankfurt-on-Mains. During WWI, he worked at the University of Würzburg on advances in communications. After the War, he was appointed at the University of Berlin, where he worked until just before WWII. In 1945, during WWII, he was taken to England along with some other German scientists and confined there. After this, he worked at the Max Planck Institute and the Fritz Haber Institute for Physical Chemistry in turn.
His early research focused on the applications of thermodynamics to light and radiation phenomena. Later, he did work on x-ray diffraction by crystals and x-ray optics. The discovery of the diffraction of x-rays by a crystal was an important contribution, as it proved that x-rays were electromagnetic in nature. Throughout his career, he was interested by Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and wrote several papers on applications of the theory. Also, he performed some work on superconductivity, and explained how the shape of a superconductor can affect the threshold magnetic field which will destroy superconductivity within it.
He was awarded the 1914 Nobel Prize in physics
"for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by
crystals"
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Researched on www.nobel.se