Martinus J. G. Veltman
Martinus Justinus Godefriedus Veltman ( Tini Veltman short; * June 27, 1931 in Waalwijk ) is a Dutch physicist and Nobel laureate.
Life
Martinus Veltman was born on June 27, 1931 as the fourth of six children of a primary school principal in Waalwijk in the southern Netherlands. After finishing school in 1948 he entered the University of Utrecht with the study of physics and was the 1953 pre-degree with average success. After graduating in 1956 he served until 1959, his three years of military service, and then began his PhD in Theoretical Physics at Léon Van Hove. He moved to Geneva in 1961, as his thesis supervisor was appointed head of the Theory Division at CERN in 1960, and completed his doctorate in 1963. After a few months he spent at CERN with additional calculations and the observation of neutrino experiments, he went to SLAC to Stanford, but returned after a few months to CERN. He returned back to Utrecht in 1968 and took over the chair of his doctor father at his retirement. During a sabbatical year at the University of Michigan, he decided on a change in the United States and moved in the fall of 1981 to Ann Arbor. He retired in 1996 and since then has lived in Bilthoven, the Netherlands.
He married in 1960 Anneke and has a daughter ( Hélène, * 1961, also a physicist ) and two sons ( Hugo, born in 1966; Martijn, 1971).
His doctoral include Gerardus ' t Hooft, Peter van Nieuwenhuizen and Bernard de Wit.
Services
Veltman worked together with one of his students, Gerardus ' t Hooft, in the mathematical formulation of non -Abelian gauge theories (Yang -Mills theory ) and their renormalization. He succeeded in 1977 to predict the mass of the top quark, an important step for its detection in 1995.
In 1963 he developed at SLAC one of the first computer algebra systems ( Schoon chip), which he used for the calculation of Feynman diagrams.
In 1999 he was honored along with Gerardus ' t Hooft the Nobel Prize " for elucidating the quantum structure relevant contributions to the theory of electroweak interactions in physics ".
Writings (selection )
- Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics. World Scientific 2003, ISBN 9812381481
- Diagrammatica. The path to Feynman rules, Cambridge University Press 1995
- With Gerardus t'Hooft Diagrammar, CERN Preprint 1973, Online
Awards and honors
- High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the EPS, 1993
- Dirac Medal ( ICTP ), 1996
- Nobel Prize in Physics, 1999
After the asteroid Veltman ( 9492 ) Veltman was named.