Maximilian Kaluza (22 September 1856 in Ratibor, Upper Silesia – 1 December 1921 in Königsberg, East Prussia) was a German scholar of English philology.
Maximilian "Max" Kaluza studied from 1873 to 1877 at the Matthias Gymnasium in Wroclaw and was awarded his Ph.D. with a dissertation on the relationship of the Middle English alliterative poem William of Palerne to its French models on 12 January 1881. After passing the Staatsexamen in December 1881, he was a probationary candidate and assistant teacher at the Gymnasium in Racibórz from 1882 to 1884, and from 1884 to 1887 a high school teacher in Opole.
On 17 May 1887 Kaluza completed his Habilitation at the Albertus-Universität Königsberg with a text about the manuscript transmission of the Middle English poem Libeaus Desconus, becoming a professor of English language and literature. From July 1894 he was at the university as an adjunct professor and director of the English Seminar and after June 1902 a full professor. He retired during the summer of 1921.
Among Kaluza's research was an observation concerning the metrical characteristics of unstressed vowels in the Old English poem Beowulf,[1] on which the name 'Kaluza's law' was later bestowed, apparently by R. D. Fulk.[2][3] The significance of Kaluza's observations for the dating of Beowulf has been debated extensively.
His son Theodor Kaluza (1885-1954) was a German physicist, and his grandson Theodor Kaluza (1910-1994) a mathematician.