On returning to Copenhagen from Manchester in 1912, Bohr took up a position as assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen, and also married Margrethe Nørlund. Thomson (the discoverer of the electron), and then at the University of Manchester under Ernest Rutherford (the discoverer of the nucleus and the structure of atoms). For his post-doctoral studies, Bohr moved to England, first conducting experiments at Trinity College, Cambridge under J.

He completed his doctorate in 1911, under the physicist Christian Christiansen. Niels’ younger brother, Harald, became a brilliant mathematician as well as an international footballer.īohr enrolled as an undergraduate at Copenhagen University in 1903, initially studying philosophy and mathematics, but switching to physics in 1905 after winning an essay competition with a report on the properties of surface tension. His father was a devout Lutheran and a respected professor of physiology at the University of Copenhagen his mother came from a prominent and wealthy Jewish family of bankers and parliamentarians. Niels Henrik David Bohr was born in Copenhagen, Denmark on 7 October 1885. He is recognized as one of the most influential physicists of the 20th Century, and received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 “for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them”.

He mentored and collaborated with many of the top physicists of the century at his institute in Copenhagen, where he and Werner Heisenberg developed the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum theory.

In particular, he developed the Bohr model of the atom (and later the “liquid drop” model) and the principles of correspondence and complementarity. Niels Bohr was a Danish physicist who made fundamental contributions to understanding the structure of atoms and to the early development of quantum mechanics.

Niels bohr atomic theory