Curated category
Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Albert EinsteinWhen Albert Einstein was five and sick in bed, his father brought him a compass. The trembling needle, always pointing the same way, convinced the boy that…
- James ChadwickIn February 1932, after only about two weeks at the laboratory bench, James Chadwick sent a letter to the journal Nature with a deliberately tentative title…
- Charles DarwinCharles Robert Darwin once jotted his thoughts about marriage on two scraps of paper, drawing two columns headed "Marry" and "Not Marry".
- Wander Johannes de HaasWander Johannes de Haas was born on the 2nd of March 1878 in Lisse. This small town sits near Leiden in the Netherlands.
- Thomas JeffersonThomas Jefferson died on the 4th of July, 1826 , the same day as John Adams, on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
- Joris BorghoutsJoris Frans Borghouts entered the world on the 17th of June 1939 in Ginneken. His academic path led him to Leiden University where he earned his doctorate in…
- Claude Louis BertholletClaude Louis Berthollet spent decades arguing a point that every other leading chemist of his era believed was wrong. He was born on the 9th of December 1748…
- Hendrik LorentzHendrik Antoon Lorentz died on the 4th of February 1928, and three days later something remarkable happened at his funeral in Haarlem.
- John von NeumannJohn von Neumann once told a colleague that the second incompleteness theorem had struck a harder blow to mathematics than even its discoverer believed.
- Max PlanckMax Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born on the 23rd of April 1858 in Kiel, and he would go on to crack open one of the most stubborn problems in all of physics…
- Werner HeisenbergWerner Heisenberg was born on the 5th of December 1901 in Würzburg, Germany, the son of a secondary school teacher who would become Germany's only ordinarius…
- Hermann OldenbergHermann Oldenberg was born in Hamburg on the 31st of October 1854, and by the time he died in Göttingen in March 1920, he had left a body of scholarly work…
- Jan GondaJan Gonda entered the world on the 14th of April 1905 in the Dutch city of Gouda. He would later die in Utrecht on the 28th of July 1991.
- Louis PasteurOn the 6th of July 1885, Louis Pasteur faced a choice that could have ended in his prosecution. A 9-year-old boy named Joseph Meister had been badly mauled…
- Carl Friedrich GaussJohann Carl Friedrich Gauss was nineteen years old when he solved a problem the Ancient Greeks had left open for more than two thousand years.
- Bronisław MalinowskiBronisław Malinowski arrived in the Trobriand Islands in 1915 having already made one embarrassing mistake. On his first field trip, lodged with a local…
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died on the 30th of October 2009, at the age of 100, and for four days the world did not know. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy…
- Henri FrankfortHenri Frankfort entered the world on the 24th of February 1897 in Amsterdam. He grew up within a liberal Jewish family that shaped his early worldview.
- Claude ShannonClaude Elwood Shannon was born on the 30th of April 1916, in a hospital in Petoskey, Michigan, and by the time he died on the 24th of February 2001, he had…
- Henri PoincaréHenri Poincaré was born on the 29th of April 1854 in the Cité Ducale neighborhood of Nancy, and by the time he died on the 17th of July 1912, he had touched…
- Johan HuizingaJohan Huizinga was born in Groningen on the 7th of December 1872, the son of a professor of physiology named Dirk Huizinga.
- Peter Brown (historian)Peter Robert Lamont Brown was born on the 26th of July 1935 in Dublin, Ireland. His family background was Scots-Irish Protestant.
- Michael FaradayMichael Faraday could not do trigonometry. His mathematical abilities were limited to the simplest algebra. Yet James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist who turned…
- Arthur EvansArthur Evans knelt in a flower-covered hill on the Greek island of Crete in March 1900, and within a few months he had uncovered one of the most complex…
- Svante ArrheniusSvante Arrhenius taught himself to read at age three, not because anyone encouraged him, but because he decided to. By watching his father add numbers in…
- Pierre-Simon LaplacePierre-Simon Laplace stood before Napoleon Bonaparte in the early years of the nineteenth century and handed him a copy of his book on the universe.
- Pieter GeylPieter Geyl spent thirteen months inside Buchenwald concentration camp with a half-finished argument in his pocket. The Dutch historian had written an…
- Niels BohrNiels Bohr once described the tension at the heart of all good teaching as the struggle between "Klarheit und Wahrheit" - clarity and truth.
- Arthur EddingtonArthur Stanley Eddington stood at the center of one of the most dramatic moments in twentieth-century science. On the 29th of May 1919, during a total solar…
- Ivan PavlovIvan Petrovich Pavlov was born on the 26th of September 1849 in Ryazan, a city in the Russian Empire, the eldest of ten children born to a village Orthodox…
- Annemarie SchimmelAnnemarie Schimmel was born on the 7th of April 1922 in Erfurt, Germany. Her father Paul worked as a postal worker while her mother Anna came from a family…
- Theodor MommsenTheodor Mommsen stood up at a formal banquet at the University of Berlin in 1892, and the entire room rose with him. Mark Twain was there, seated at the head…
- Barthold Georg NiebuhrBarthold Georg Niebuhr was born in Copenhagen on the 27th of August 1776, the son of Carsten Niebuhr, a prominent German geographer.
- Victor DuruyJean Victor Duruy entered the world on the 10th of September 1811 in Paris. His father worked as a factory worker and expected his son to follow that trade.
- Joel MokyrJoel Mokyr was born on the 26th of July 1946 in Leiden, Netherlands, into a family of Dutch Jews who had survived the Holocaust.
- Erwin PanofskyErwin Panofsky looked at a fifteenth-century Flemish painting of a man and a woman in a dim room and saw something no one else had seen: a legal contract.
- Peter DebyePeter Debye was born in Maastricht in the Netherlands on the 24th of March 1884, and by the time he died on the 2nd of November 1966, his name had been…