Birth of Hendrik Lorentz

Hendrik Lorentz was born on 18 July 1853 in Arnhem. A Dutch physicist, Lorentz was a leading theorist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He developed an electron theory of matter and, with Pieter Zeeman, explained the splitting of spectral lines in a magnetic field, for which they shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics. The Lorentz transformations, which relate measurements in moving frames, laid mathematical groundwork for Einstein's special relativity. A professor at Leiden, he was highly respected as a mentor and chair of the Solvay Conferences, and he also led Dutch engineering efforts to design the dikes of the Zuiderzee works.

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