Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics. Planck made numerous contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame as a scientist rests primarily on his position as the originator of quantum theory, which revolutionized human understanding of atomic and subatomic processes. Nevertheless, his name is also known on a broader academic basis, through the renaming of the German scientific organization, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (of which he was twice president), to the Max Planck Society (MPS) that now includes 83 institutions representing a broad range of scientific disciplines.