A Brill Calendar: February 4

The Life of Lorentz

Few individuals surpass Hendrik Antoon Lorentz in each personal attainment making the increase of knowledge a humanist ideal.

When he died, at 74 years of age, in Haarlem on February 4, 1928, his funeral became a roll-call of scientists from all over Europe, paying homage to the Leyden Professor-Emeritus and early Nobel Prize winner (1902). Among them was Albert Einstein, Leyden ‘Extra-ordinarius’, who said in his obituary: ‘He shaped his life as an exquisite piece of art in minute detail. His unfailing friendliness, generosity and feeling for justice, joined with an unfailing, intuitive understanding of people and their acting made him a leader in each context he entered. Everyone followed him wholeheartedly, feeling that he never intended to dominate, only to serve.’

In fundamental modern physics Lorentz’s contributions became the necessary link between James Clerk Maxwell and Einstein’s theories. There is probably still no physicist who doesn’t honour Lorentz as the greatest Dutch physicist ever; as a sage and as an almost saintly man.

Ultimately it is not boundless financial means which make a University truly great, but men like Lorentz; not bought from a shelf of available genius, but ‘grown in-house’. Lorentz, Leyden alumnus, matriculating in 1870, lived for two years in the city; then returned to Arnhem, where he was born on July 18, 1853, to pursue study in solitude, visiting Leyden just to pass exams. His Doctoral Thesis, ‘summa cum laude’ is from 1875.

Three years later, aged just 25, he became Professor Theoretical Physics of his ‘Alma Mater’. A born teacher and superb lecturer, he wrote extensively and with consummate style in English, German or French, next to a vast production in his mother-tongue. The general admiration he engendered in The Netherlands is superbly expressed by the beautiful nine-volume edition of his collected addresses by publisher Martinus Nijhoff.