Gerard 't Hooft

2026-01-21 09:31:17

Name: Gerard 't Hooft

Date: July 5, 1946

Gerard 't Hooft (Dutch: Gerardus (Gerard) 't Hooft; Den Helder, North Holland, July 5, 1946) is a Dutch theoretical physicist, professor at Utrecht University, and a joint Nobel laureate with Martinus Veltman in Physics (1999). The mathematical methods they developed for renormalizing Yang–Mills fields, both massless and those acquiring mass due to spontaneous symmetry breaking, made it possible to calculate certain effects of the electroweak interaction, in particular, to estimate the masses of the intermediate vector bosons W± and Z0, predicted by theory and soon after discovered experimentally, with the obtained values agreeing well with the experimental data. Veltman and 't Hooft's method was also used to calculate the mass of the top quark, experimentally discovered at Fermilab National Laboratory (1995). Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (1982), foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences (1984), the French Academy of Sciences (1995), and the Russian Academy of Sciences (2019).