Hendrik Antoon Lorentz Biography

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World of Mathematics on Hendrik Antoon Lorentz

The work of Hendrik Antoon Lorentz went far in explaining and elaborating on the electromagnetic theory first proposed by James Clerk Maxwell. Not only did Lorentz explain the Zeeman effect and name the electron, but he also advanced a theory about electromagnetic phenomena that would reach its full flower in Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was born in Arnhem, The Netherlands, on July 18, 1853. He was the son of Gerrit Frederik Lorentz, a nursery owner, and Geertruida van Ginkel. His mother died when he was four, and his father remarried when he was nine.

Young Hendrik was a bright child, interested in physical science and mathematics from an early age. He mastered the logarithm tables when he was just nine. He also had a tremendous aptitude for languages, and later read and wrote widely in French, English and German as well as his native Dutch. In addition to attending regular school in Arnhem, where he excelled in science, he also attended a special evening school, where he determined his own path of study.

In 1870 went to the University of Leiden, and by 1871 was in the doctoral program. While he pursued his own studies, he taught high school in Arnhem. In 1875 he earned his doctoral degree, and his work concerned a new theory that few other scientists at the time grasped as well as the young Dutchman did: the electromagnetic theory of James Clerk Maxwell.

In 1877, the 24-year-old Lorentz became the first chair of theoretical physics at the University of Leiden. Among the young physicists he would influence during his career there was Albert Einstein.

He married Alletta Vaiser, the niece of one of his former professors, P. Vaiser, in 1881. Together they had two daughters, Geertruida (1885) and Johanna (1889) and a son Rudolf, born in 1895. A fourth child, a boy born between Johanna and Rudolf, died in infancy.

Lorentz enjoyed a long and productive career. He was the man who gave us the term "electron," being the first to give a name to the electrically charged particles that are part of all matter. Beginning in 1892, he began publishing three or four papers on his electron theory, a pace he would maintain through 1904. He produced calculus and physics textbooks that were reprinted numerous times.

He also developed new ideas concerning electromagnetic theory. He had studied the work of Maxwell while preparing for his doctoral degree, and was one of the few scientists who could make sense of Maxwell's rather cagey phrasing, which warned readers regarding their perception of the nature of electricity by saying: "it is, or is not, a substance, or that it is, or is not, a form of energy, or that it belongs to any known category of physical quantities."

Lorentz based his theory on the activity of electrons that reacted with each other through a stationary "ether." He successfully applied his theory to a previously unexplained phenomenon that Pieter Zeeman had observed: the change of spectral lines in a strong magnetic field. In 1902, Lorentz and Zeeman shared the Nobel Prize for their work.

However, Lorentz did not stop there. He turned his attention to the action of velocity of the system on electromagnetic phenomena, and determined that the phenomena are independent; that is, whether the system is stationary or moving at the speed of light, electromagnetic activity remains unchanged. This is known as Lorentz's principle of correlation. Lorentz's work served as the basis for much of Einstein's work on relativity.

From 1909 to 1921, Lorentz served as president of the physics section of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also chaired the Solvay conferences in physics from 1911 to 1927. Lorentz died after a brief illness on February 4, 1928, in Haarlem, the Netherlands. He was immensely popular and respected, and as a show of that respect, all telephone and telegraph service was suspended for three minutes on the day of his funeral. Einstein delivered the eulogy for his former teacher, whom he called, "the greatest and noblest man of our times."