Martinus J. G. Veltman

In 1960, Veltman married Anneke. The couple has three children. Their eldest child Hélène studied particle physics at Berkeley but now works in the banking sector in London. The second child Hugo runs a restaurant called Solstice in Los Angeles and his youngest child Martijn is in the movie industry in Hollywood.

After he retired in 1996, he and his wife Anneke returned to Netherland and settled in Bilthoven, a town where they lived prior to 1981. However, their two sons chose to stay back in the USA while his daughter continues to live in London.

In 2003, he published a book about particle physics titled, ‘Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics’. The book is meant for general readers.

Martinus Justinus Godefriedus Veltman was born on June 27, 1931 in the ancient city of Waalwijk, located in Southern Netherland. His father was a primary school headmaster, who placed great emphasis on education. Martinus was the fourth of his parents’ six children.

Until 1940, his life was quite uneventful. He started his education at a local elementary school and was considered a good student. The turbulence began when in 1940 the Germans marched into the town. They turned their school into a military barrack and so classes were improvised.

In 1943, he entered the high school, but his grades began to suffer. Moreover, he had a bad aptitude for languages and they were required to learn three foreign languages! Sometime now, he also developed interest in electronics. After some time, he began to repair radios, with his right hand index finger as his only measuring tool and in the process received electrical shocks a number of times.

In 1948, he graduated from school with very poor marks. In general, students like him went to a medium level technical school called MTS in Hertogenbosch. However, because of his poor marks, there was very little chance of him getting admission there.

Therefore, on the advice of his physics teacher, he enrolled at University of Utrecht with physics. Unfortunately, the condition of the university was not at all satisfactory. Because of the war, there were very few good professors left and lectures were not at all inspiring. Therefore, he did not develop any interest in his subject.

In 1963, soon after earning his PhD, Veltman joined SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory under Stanford University, Stanford, California. Here he started developing the Schoonschip, a computer program meant for symbolic manipulation of mathematical equations. It is now considered the very first computer algebra system.

In the spring of 1964, Veltman returned to CERN. Later in 1966, he visited Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York City, for a brief period, returning to the Netherland the same year.

In September 1966, he joined University of Utrecht as Professor of theoretical physics. Simultaneously, he also began to function as the editor of ‘Physics Letter’; but gave up the responsibility in the summer of 1968.

In April 1968, he made a one-month visit to the Rockefeller University. He considers this visit a turning point in his career because it was here that he started the work, which would one day bring him the Nobel Prize.

Later in the same year, he went to Orsay in France on the invitation of Claude Bouchiat and Philippe Meyer. Here too he continued his work till his return to Utrecht at the end of the year.

Professor Veltman is best known for his work on renormalization of Yang–Mills theories. Prior to their work, the electroweak theory lacked any mathematical foundation. In 1969, Veltman and his graduate student Gerardus ’t Hooft set out to change (renormalize) it into a workable theory, which was free from irrational infinite quantities.

Veltman had by then designed a computer program meant for symbolic manipulation of mathematical equations. Now they used that to provide the required mathematical basis and identified the properties of the W and Z particles. Later the scientists used that model to calculate the physical quantities of other particles.