Short answers, pulled from the story.
Max Planck discovered energy quanta, proposing that electromagnetic energy is emitted only in discrete, fixed-size packets rather than as a continuous flow. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1918 for this discovery, which the Royal Swedish Academy cited as the advancement of physics through his discovery of energy quanta.
Max Planck was born on the 23rd of April 1858 in Kiel. He died on the 4th of October 1947 in Göttingen, where he is buried at the Stadtfriedhof.
The Planck constant is the fixed elementary unit of energy that Planck introduced in 1899, relating the energy of a photon to its frequency. It is of foundational importance for quantum physics and enabled Planck to define a universal set of physical units, including the Planck length and Planck mass, all grounded in fundamental constants of nature.
When the Nazis took power in 1933, Planck was 74 and serving as president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. He sought a personal meeting with Adolf Hitler in May 1933 to argue that expelling Jewish scientists would damage German science, but the meeting failed to change policy. He resigned his presidency of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1938 when it was absorbed into the Nazi system, and his son Erwin was executed on the 23rd of January 1945 for alleged involvement in the assassination attempt against Hitler.
Planck was among the first scientists to recognize the significance of Einstein's special theory of relativity in 1905 and used his influence to promote it in Germany. He later arranged a professorship for Einstein at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin in 1914, and the two became close friends who frequently played music together.
Planck was a lifelong member of the Lutheran Church in Germany but told historian John L. Heilbron that he did not believe in a personal God. He moved from Mach's positivism to scientific realism after discovering the quantum of action, arguing that physics must be grounded in objective realities independent of human observation. In a 1937 lecture titled "Religion und Naturwissenschaft" he described religious symbols as an imperfect but genuine pathway to worship.