Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was widely regarded as the world's leading theoretical physicist at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. His earliest work dealt with optical phenomena, but by 1892 he had begun to develop one of the concepts for which he is most famous, the electron theory. Based on the presumed existence of tiny charged particles in matter, this theory explained a number of well-known physical phenomena. In 1902 Lorentz received the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the interaction of radiation and matter; he shared the award with Pieter Zeeman. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Lorentz worked on the effect of motion on the properties of a particle, foreshadowing some of the fundamental concepts that were later to become part of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was born in Arnhem in the Netherlands, on July...