Famous Physicists from the Netherlands

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Updated October 14, 201871 items

List of notable or famous physicists from the Netherlands, with bios and photos, including the top physicists born in the Netherlands and even some popular physicists who immigrated to the Netherlands. If you're trying to find out the names of famous Dutch physicists then this list is the perfect resource for you. These physicists are among the most prominent in their field, and information about each well-known physicist from the Netherlands is included when available.

People include everything from Wubbo Ockels to Andre Geim.

This historic physicists from the Netherlands list can help answer the questions "Who are some Dutch physicists of note?" and "Who are the most famous physicists from the Netherlands?" These prominent physicists of the Netherlands may or may not be currently alive, but what they all have in common is that they're all respected Dutch physicists.

Use this list of renowned Dutch physicists to discover some new physicists that you aren't familiar with. Don't forget to share this list by clicking one of the social media icons at the top or bottom of the page. {#nodes}
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  • Aaldert Wapstra

    Aaldert Wapstra

    Dec. at 83 (1923-2006)
    • Birthplace: Netherlands
    Aaldert Hendrik Wapstra (24 April 1922, Utrecht โ€“ 2 December 2006, Naarden) was a Dutch physicist. Wapstra studied physics at Utrecht University and obtained his PhD with the dissertation Decay schemes of Pb209, Bi207 and Bi214 and the binding energies of the heavy nuclei at the University of Amsterdam in 1953. He became a full professor in 1955 at the department of experimental physics at the Technische Hogeschool, now the Technical University in Delft, Netherlands. On 18 March 1963 Wapstra entered the board of the IKO, now known as NIKHEF, as the scientific director of nuclear spectroscopy. He became the director in 1971, succeeding Van Lieshout, where he continued on until 1982. He retired in 1987. Wapstra is renowned for his work on the Atomic Mass Evaluation, in the beginning together with Josef Mattauch at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and later on with his colleague Georges Audi at Universitรฉ de Paris-Sud. For this work he obtained the SUNAMCO medal of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) in September 2004.
  • Abraham Pais

    Abraham Pais

    Dec. at 82 (1918-2000)
    • Birthplace: Amsterdam, Netherlands
    Abraham Pais (; May 19, 1918 โ€“ July 28, 2000) was a Dutch-American physicist and science historian. Pais earned his Ph.D. from University of Utrecht just prior to a Nazi ban on Jewish participation in Dutch universities during World War II. When the Nazis began the forced relocation of Dutch Jews, he went into hiding, but was later arrested and saved only by the end of the war. He then served as an assistant to Niels Bohr in Denmark and was later a colleague of Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Pais wrote books documenting the lives of these two great physicists and the contributions they and others made to modern physics. He was a physics professor at Rockefeller University until his retirement.
  • Adriaan Fokker

    Adriaan Fokker

    Dec. at 85 (1887-1972)
    • Birthplace: Dutch East Indies
    Adriaan Daniรซl Fokker (Dutch pronunciation: [หˆaหdriaหn หˆdaหniษ›l หˆfษ”kษ™r]; 17 August 1887 โ€“ 24 September 1972) was a Dutch physicist and musician. He was the inventor of the Fokker organ, a 31-tone equal-tempered organ.
  • Aldert Van der Ziel

    Aldert Van der Ziel

    Dec. at 81 (1910-1991)
    Prof. Dr. Aldert van der Ziel, was a Dutch physicist who studied electronic noise processes in materials such as semiconductors and metals.
  • Andre Geim

    Andre Geim

    Age: 64
    • Birthplace: Sochi, Krasnodar, Russia
    Sir Andre Konstantin Geim, FRS, HonFRSC, HonFInstP (born 21 October 1958) is a Dutch-British physicist working in England in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester.Geim was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Konstantin Novoselov for his work on graphene. He is Regius Professor of Physics and Royal Society Research Professor at the National Graphene Institute. In addition to the 2010 Nobel Prize, he received an Ig Nobel Prize in 2000 for using the magnetic properties of water scaling to levitate a small frog with magnets. This makes him the first, and thus far only, person to receive both the prestigious science award and its tongue-in-cheek equivalent.
  • Antonius van den Broek

    Antonius van den Broek

    Dec. at 56 (1870-1926)
    Antonius Johannes van den Broek (4 May 1870, Zoetermeer โ€“ 25 October 1926, Bilthoven) was a Dutch amateur physicist notable for being the first who realized that the number of an element in the periodic table (now called atomic number) corresponds to the charge of its atomic nucleus. This hypothesis was published in 1911 and inspired the experimental work of Henry Moseley, who found good experimental evidence for it by 1913.