The work of the physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853-1928) on electromagnetic theory led to notions equivalent to some basic postulates of the special theory of relativity.

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, the son of Gerrit Frederik Lorentz and his wife, Geertruida van Ginkel, was born on July 18, 1853, in Aarnhem. At the age of 9 he mastered the use of a table of logarithms. In high school he excelled in the sciences, as well as in history and languages. In 1870 he passed the examinations to qualify for the University of Leiden. By the end of the next year he had become a doctoral candidate.

During the next 2 years Lorentz taught high school physics and mathematics in Aarnhem. In June 1873 he returned to Leiden and received his doctoral degree; his dissertation revealed at one stroke his extraordinary grasp of what constituted at that time the most advanced and most portentous part of theoretical...