Christiaan Huygens
1629 - 1695
HPI 82.04100 languages
Christiaan Huygens was a Dutch mathematician and astronomer who is most famous for inventing the pendulum clock in 1656.
The Most Famous
Physicists from Netherlands
25 notable people
This page contains a list of the greatest Dutchs Physicists. The pantheon dataset contains 863 Physicists, 25 of which were born in Netherlands. This makes Netherlands the birth place of the 7th most number of Physicists behind Russia and Italy.
Top 10 Dutch Physicists
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary Dutch Physicists of all time. This list of famous Dutch Physicists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography's online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of Dutch Physicists.
#1 #2 
Hendrik Lorentz
1853 - 1928
HPI 81.81104 languagesHendrik Lorentz is most famous for his work in the field of electromagnetism. He is credited with the discovery of the relationship between electricity and magnetism.
#3 
Daniel Bernoulli
1700 - 1782
HPI 80.9781 languagesDaniel Bernoulli is most famous for his work in fluid mechanics. He is also famous for his contributions to the kinetic theory of gases.
#4 
Pieter Zeeman
1865 - 1943
HPI 80.5398 languagesPieter Zeeman is most famous for his discovery of the Zeeman effect, which is the splitting of a spectral line into several components in the presence of a magnetic field.
#5 
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
1853 - 1926
HPI 78.0789 languagesHeike Kamerlingh Onnes is most famous for his discovery of superconductivity. He was the first to liquefy helium, and he discovered that mercury has a critical temperature of 4.2 degrees Kelvin.
#6 
Johannes Diderik van der Waals
1837 - 1923
HPI 77.5195 languagesJohannes Diderik van der Waals was a Dutch physicist who is most famous for his work in the field of thermodynamics.
#7 
Peter Debye
1884 - 1966
HPI 75.7175 languagesPeter Debye is most famous for his work in the field of chemistry. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1936 for his work in the field of electrolytic dissociation.
#8 
Simon van der Meer
1925 - 2011
HPI 74.7472 languagesSimon van der Meer is most famous for being a Dutch physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 for his contributions to the discovery of the subatomic J/psi particle.
#9 
Nicolaas Bloembergen
1920 - 2017
HPI 73.9374 languagesNicolaas Bloembergen is most famous for his work in the field of optics, specifically the development of the laser.
#10 
Frits Zernike
1888 - 1966
HPI 73.5773 languagesFrits Zernike was a Dutch physicist who invented the Zernike polynomials. These polynomials are used to describe the shape of a wavefront.
People by Birth Decade
Browse notable Dutchs Physicists grouped by birth decade. Each decade shows the top 10 by HPI; expand to see everyone.
1960s(1)
1930s(1)
1910s(1)
1900s(2)
1890s(2)
1860s(1)
1830s(1)
1730s(1)
1700s(1)
1620s(1)
Overlapping Lives
Which Physicists were alive at the same time? This visualization shows the lifespans of the 24 most globally memorable Physicists since 1700.
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
