Hendrik Lorentz

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was a Dutch theoretical physicist of towering international stature who bridged nineteenth-century classical physics and twentieth-century modern physics. Appointed professor of theoretical physics at Leiden University at only twenty-four, Lorentz refined James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic theory by proposing that matter consists of microscopic electric charges (electrons) and that electromagnetic waves are generated by their motion.

Lorentz theoretically explained the Zeeman effect (the splitting of spectral lines in a magnetic field), sharing the second-ever Nobel Prize in Physics in 1902 with Pieter Zeeman. Seeking to reconcile electromagnetism with the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment, he introduced the concept of local time and formulated the Lorentz transformations describing how space and time coordinates change between moving reference frames. These equations formed the mathematical scaffold upon which Albert Einstein constructed the special theory of relativity. Einstein frequently revered Lorentz as his intellectual father figure.