Neils Bohr was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1885. His father was a very capable professor of physiology. His mother came from a rich Jewish family which was very active in banking, politics and education. They loved Bohr very much and helped him to fully develop his potentials.

In 1903, Bohr entered Copenhagen University to study physics. When he was still an undergraduate, his had already showed exceptional brilliance. By observing a jet of water, he could precisely calculate the surface tension of water. Bohr obtained his master degree in science in 1909 and Ph.D. degree in 1911. His Ph.D. thesis, A study on the theory of electrons in metals, qualitatively explained various properties of metals. He found inadequacies in the classical theory that make it insufficient to explain the magnetic properties of metals.

After his study at Copenhagen University, Bohr went to Cambridge University in England, in the hope of studying the theory of electron under the supervision of J.J. Thomson. However, J.J. Thomson was no longer interested in this problem. Bohr therefore immediately went to the University of Manchester and worked in E. Rutherford's laboratory. In 1913, he published three articles on the unification of the existing atomic model and the quantum theory, which laid a milestone in physics.

Bohr began his blessed marriage in 1912. In 1916, he became a professor at Copenhagen. In 1921, he founded the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Copenhagen. Bohr visited the U.S. in 1939 and announced that Copenhagen Laboratory had already confirmed the release of energy in the nuclear decay of Uranium. In 1940, Denmark was taken over by Germany. In 1943, the Allied forces arranged Bohr and his family to escape from Denmark. They first went to Sweden, then England, and finally arrived in the U.S.. In the U.S., he and his son, Aage, served as consultants for the National Laboratory at Los Alamos, where they contributed a lot to the production of the first atomic bomb. In 1945, Bohr was back to Copenhagen and worked on the peaceful use of atomic energy.

Bohr won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. In 1957, he was awarded the first U.S. Atoms for Peace Award. Since 1939, he had been the chairman of the Denmark Royal Academy of Sciences. Every time when an appointment was expired, people re-elected him. He was the chairman of the Academy till he died on 18 November 1962, in Copenhagen.

Bohr was healthy all his life. When he was young, he was a brilliant football player. Bohr had a perfect family life. He and his wife were a nice couple and they had five sons. The fourth son, Aage, was a famous nuclear physicist. Aage, together with other two physicists, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957.