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Gerard 't Hooft
Gerardus "Gerard" 't Hooft (Dutch: [ˈɣeːrɑrt ət ˈɦoːft]; born July 5, 1946) is a Dutch theoretical physicist and professor emeritus at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with his thesis advisor Martinus J. G. Veltman "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions."
His work concentrates on gauge theory, black holes, quantum gravity and fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics. His contributions to physics include: a proof that gauge theories are renormalizable; dimensional regularization; and the holographic principle.
't Hooft was born in Den Helder on July 5, 1946, to Hendrik 't Hooft and Margaretha Agnes 'Peggy' van Kampen, but grew up in The Hague. He was the middle child in a family of three. He comes from a family of scholars. His great-uncle was Nobel Prize laureate Frits Zernike; his maternal grandfather was Pieter Nicolaas van Kampen, a professor of zoology at Leiden University; his uncle Nico van Kampen was a professor emeritus of theoretical physics at Utrecht University, and his father was a maritime engineer. Following his family's footsteps, he showed an interest in science at an early age. When his primary school teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he replied, "a man who knows everything."
After primary school Gerard attended the Dalton Lyceum, a school that implemented the Dalton Plan, an educational method that suited him well. He excelled in science and mathematics. At the age of sixteen, he won a silver medal in the second Dutch Math Olympiad.
After 't Hooft passed his secondary-school exams in 1964, he enrolled in the physics program at Utrecht University. He opted for Utrecht instead of the much closer Leiden, because his uncle was a professor there and he wanted to attend his lectures. Since Gerard focused solely on science, his father insisted he join the Utrechtsch Studenten Corps, a student association, in the hope that he would engage in activities outside of studying. To some extent this worked: During his studies he was a coxswain with the rowing club "Triton" and organized a national congress for science students with the science discussion club "Christiaan Huygens".
In the course of his studies, he decided to delve into what he perceived as the heart of theoretical physics: elementary particles. His uncle had grown to dislike the subject and in particular its practitioners. When it became time to write his doctoraalscriptie (former name of the Dutch equivalent of a master's thesis) in 1968, 't Hooft turned to Martinus Veltman, the newly appointed professor who specialized in Yang–Mills theory. At the time, this subject was considered relatively fringe, because it was thought that it could not be renormalized. His assignment was to study the Adler–Bell–Jackiw anomaly, a mismatch in the theory of the decay of neutral pions; formal arguments forbid the decay into photons, whereas practical calculations and experiments showed that this was the primary form of decay. The resolution of the problem was completely unknown at the time, and 't Hooft was unable to provide one.
In 1969, 't Hooft began his doctoral research under the guidance of Martinus Veltman. He worked on the same subject as Veltman: the renormalization of Yang–Mills theories. In 1971 his first paper was published. In it he demonstrated how to renormalize massless Yang–Mills fields, and was able to derive relations between amplitudes. These relations would later be generalized by Andrei Slavnov and John C. Taylor and become known as the Slavnov–Taylor identities.
The world took little notice, but Veltman was excited because he realized that the problem he had been working on had been solved. A period of intense collaboration followed, during which they developed the technique of dimensional regularization. Soon, 't Hooft's second paper was ready to be published, in which he showed that Yang–Mills theories with massive fields due to spontaneous symmetry breaking could be renormalized. This paper earned them worldwide recognition and ultimately won them the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Gerard 't Hooft
Gerardus "Gerard" 't Hooft (Dutch: [ˈɣeːrɑrt ət ˈɦoːft]; born July 5, 1946) is a Dutch theoretical physicist and professor emeritus at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with his thesis advisor Martinus J. G. Veltman "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions."
His work concentrates on gauge theory, black holes, quantum gravity and fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics. His contributions to physics include: a proof that gauge theories are renormalizable; dimensional regularization; and the holographic principle.
't Hooft was born in Den Helder on July 5, 1946, to Hendrik 't Hooft and Margaretha Agnes 'Peggy' van Kampen, but grew up in The Hague. He was the middle child in a family of three. He comes from a family of scholars. His great-uncle was Nobel Prize laureate Frits Zernike; his maternal grandfather was Pieter Nicolaas van Kampen, a professor of zoology at Leiden University; his uncle Nico van Kampen was a professor emeritus of theoretical physics at Utrecht University, and his father was a maritime engineer. Following his family's footsteps, he showed an interest in science at an early age. When his primary school teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he replied, "a man who knows everything."
After primary school Gerard attended the Dalton Lyceum, a school that implemented the Dalton Plan, an educational method that suited him well. He excelled in science and mathematics. At the age of sixteen, he won a silver medal in the second Dutch Math Olympiad.
After 't Hooft passed his secondary-school exams in 1964, he enrolled in the physics program at Utrecht University. He opted for Utrecht instead of the much closer Leiden, because his uncle was a professor there and he wanted to attend his lectures. Since Gerard focused solely on science, his father insisted he join the Utrechtsch Studenten Corps, a student association, in the hope that he would engage in activities outside of studying. To some extent this worked: During his studies he was a coxswain with the rowing club "Triton" and organized a national congress for science students with the science discussion club "Christiaan Huygens".
In the course of his studies, he decided to delve into what he perceived as the heart of theoretical physics: elementary particles. His uncle had grown to dislike the subject and in particular its practitioners. When it became time to write his doctoraalscriptie (former name of the Dutch equivalent of a master's thesis) in 1968, 't Hooft turned to Martinus Veltman, the newly appointed professor who specialized in Yang–Mills theory. At the time, this subject was considered relatively fringe, because it was thought that it could not be renormalized. His assignment was to study the Adler–Bell–Jackiw anomaly, a mismatch in the theory of the decay of neutral pions; formal arguments forbid the decay into photons, whereas practical calculations and experiments showed that this was the primary form of decay. The resolution of the problem was completely unknown at the time, and 't Hooft was unable to provide one.
In 1969, 't Hooft began his doctoral research under the guidance of Martinus Veltman. He worked on the same subject as Veltman: the renormalization of Yang–Mills theories. In 1971 his first paper was published. In it he demonstrated how to renormalize massless Yang–Mills fields, and was able to derive relations between amplitudes. These relations would later be generalized by Andrei Slavnov and John C. Taylor and become known as the Slavnov–Taylor identities.
The world took little notice, but Veltman was excited because he realized that the problem he had been working on had been solved. A period of intense collaboration followed, during which they developed the technique of dimensional regularization. Soon, 't Hooft's second paper was ready to be published, in which he showed that Yang–Mills theories with massive fields due to spontaneous symmetry breaking could be renormalized. This paper earned them worldwide recognition and ultimately won them the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics.