Curated playlist
Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Albert EinsteinGerman-born theoretical physicist (1879–1955)
- 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: "Possible Existence of a Neutron." Three months later, the hedging was gone. His…
- Charles DarwinCharles Robert Darwin once jotted his thoughts about marriage on two scraps of paper, drawing two columns headed "Marry" and "Not Marry". Under the case for marriage he wrote that a wife would be a "constant companion and a friend in old…
- Wander Johannes de HaasWander Johannes de Haas was born on the 2nd of March 1878 in Lisse, a small town near Leiden in the Netherlands. He would go on to attach his name to three distinct physics effects, each one now carrying the weight of a life spent probing…
- 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. Adams's last words, spoken without knowing Jefferson had already died a few hours earlier, were:…
- Joris BorghoutsJoris Frans Borghouts titled his 1971 doctoral dissertation The magical texts of Papyrus Leiden I 348, earning his degree at Leiden University. Born in Ginneken on the 17th of June 1939, he spent his working life across two Dutch…
- 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 in Talloires, a small town near Annecy in the Duchy of Savoy, and he would…
- Hendrik LorentzHendrik Antoon Lorentz died on the 4th of February 1928, and three days later something remarkable happened at his funeral in Haarlem. At the stroke of noon, the entire State telegraph and telephone network of the Netherlands fell silent…
- 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. He was born in Budapest in 1903 and died at age 53 in 1957, and in those years he…
- 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 by proposing an idea that, at the time, he himself could barely believe. That…
- 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 professor of medieval and modern Greek studies. That background in language and…
- 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 that touched almost every corner of ancient Indian religious literature. He…
- Jan GondaJan Gonda was born in Gouda on the 14th of April 1905, and by the time he died in Utrecht on the 28th of July 1991, he had spent sixty years publishing scholarly articles on Indian Sanskrit and Indonesian Javanese texts. He never set foot…
- 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 by a rabid dog. Pasteur held a rabies vaccine he had tested in dogs, but he held no…
- 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. He proved that a regular seventeen-sided polygon, the heptadecagon, could be drawn with nothing…
- 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 missionary, he had relied on a translator to reach the people he was meant to study.…
- 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 finally spoke, he called Lévi-Strauss "one of the greatest ethnologists of all time."…
- Henri FrankfortHenri Frankfort was born in Amsterdam on the 24th of February 1897, into a liberal Jewish family, and he would spend his life crossing the boundaries that separated ancient worlds. His name appears in footnotes to some of the most…
- 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 done something almost no individual in history can claim: he invented an entirely…
- 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 nearly every branch of mathematics that existed in his lifetime. His peers called…
- Johan HuizingaJohan Huizinga was born in Groningen on the 7th of December 1872, the son of a professor of physiology named Dirk Huizinga. His mother, Jacoba Tonkens, died just two years after his birth. What is striking about the path that followed is…
- Peter Brown (historian)Peter Robert Lamont Brown was born on the 26th of July 1935. He is an Irish historian who reshaped how scholars think about an entire era. He is widely credited with bringing coherence to the study of Late Antiquity, and many regard him as…
- Michael FaradayMichael Faraday could not do trigonometry. His mathematical abilities were limited to the simplest algebra. Yet James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist who turned his findings into equations, called him a mathematician of a very high order, one…
- 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 structures the ancient world had ever produced. The site at Knossos contained more…
- 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 account books, he became an arithmetical prodigy before most children can tie their…
- 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. Napoleon, who enjoyed putting embarrassing questions to learned men, looked up and said:…
- Pieter GeylPieter Geyl spent thirteen months inside Buchenwald concentration camp with a half-finished argument in his pocket. The Dutch historian had written an article about Napoleon just before the German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940.…
- Niels BohrNiels Bohr once described the tension at the heart of all good teaching as the struggle between "Klarheit und Wahrheit" - clarity and truth. It was a conflict he never entirely resolved, and it drove him to build an entirely new picture of…
- 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 eclipse observed from the island of Príncipe off the west coast of Africa, he…
- 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 priest. The name Pavlov is today shorthand for an automatic, almost mechanical…
- Annemarie SchimmelAnnemarie Schimmel was born in Erfurt, Germany, on the 7th of April 1922, the daughter of a postal worker named Paul and his wife Anna. She later described her father as, in her own words, a wonderful playmate, full of fun. By 17 she had…
- 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 table among roughly twenty eminent professors, and he watched as the guards'…
- Barthold Georg NiebuhrBarthold Georg Niebuhr was born in Copenhagen on the 27th of August 1776, the son of Carsten Niebuhr, a prominent German geographer. He grew up to become a statesman, banker, and historian, eventually earning the title of Germany's leading…
- Victor DuruyVictor Duruy was born in Paris on the 10th of September 1811, the son of a factory worker, and his family expected him to follow his father into the trade. He had other plans. Duruy passed through the Ecole Normale Superieure with such…
- 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. His father Salomon Mok died of cancer when Mokyr was just one year old. Nine years later, he crossed the…
- 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. The year was 1934, and the painting was Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait. Panofsky…
- 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 attached to a unit of measurement, a lunar crater, a minor planet, and more than a…