Gerard ‘t Hooft

Happy 70th Birthday to Nobel laureate Gerard ‘t Hooft! The Dutch theoretical physicist earned his PhD at the University of Utrecht in 1972. At Utrecht ‘t Hooft worked with his thesis advisor Martinus Veltman to improve physicists’ understanding of fundamental particles. Today physicists rely on the standard model, a set of theories that explain particles and the forces that act on them. Back in the late 1960s, however, the standard model was still in development, and it was unclear whether it could provide useful predictions for particles not yet discovered. Veltman and ‘t Hooft developed a much-needed mathematical foundation for the standard model and used the new-and-improved model to identify the properties of particles such as the W and Z bosons. The work enabled physicists to predict the mass of the top quark, which experimenters finally discovered in 1995. Veltman and ‘t Hooft shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics. (Photo credit: Wammes Waggel, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Date in History: 5 July 1946