A couple of days ago the death of singer/actor/activist Olivia Newton-John was announced. I was aware, thanks I think to my colleague Jim Al-Khalili telling me many years ago, that she was the granddaughter of Max Born.
Max Born was a big name in quantum mechanics, famous amongst other things for the interpretation of the modulus-squared of the wave function as a probability density (the "Born rule"). Born was German and Jewish, and in 1933 almost as soon as the Nazis came to power he was suspended from the University of Göttingen. He managed to obtain a temporary position in Cambridge, England, and so emigrated to the UK where he remained until retirement, having secured a professorship at Edinburgh.
Born's daughter Irene married a Welshman called Bryn Newton-John, and they had children including the famous Olivia.
What I didn't know before reading about Olivia following her death is that she is also related to my predecessor in the nuclear theory group here at Surrey, Lewis Elton. The link is flagged up on Wikipedia because Lewis was the father of Ben Elton and the connection to Ben is mentioned, rather than to Ben's (less famous) father.
A little digging on Wikipedia allows the full family link between Olivia Newton-John and Ben Elton to be worked out, and hence the family link between Max Born and Lewis Elton:
Max's father-in-law, Victor Ehrenberg (jurist), had a brother Otto Ehrenberg. Otto's sons include another Victor Ehrenberg (historian), and this Victor was the father of Lewis. Here's the relevant section of the family tree:
My sort-of relation to Max Born can be seen in the Mathematics Genealogy Project. It shows a kind of family tree of supervisor-student relationships for PhDs in Mathematics and related areas, including theoretical physics. Max Born was my great-great-grandsupervisor, through his student Viktor Weisskopf, then Arthur Kerman, Mike Strayer, who was one of my PhD supervisors. "Family" tree below:
Cool!
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