Overcoming the academic hardships imposed by the Nazi occupation in his native Netherlands, Nicolaas Bloembergen went on to conduct important work in the study of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), the study of the absorption or emission of energy by an atomic nucleus subjected to a strongmagnetic field, during his graduate studies at Harvard University. Together with Edward Mills Purcell and Robert Pound, Bloembergen eventually coauthored one of the most cited papers on the subject, now known as "BPP" for its authors' initials. As a result of his work with NMR, Bloembergen was drawn to research on continuously operating solid-state masers and their applications. In 1981, he was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in physics for an extension of this work, the use of lasers for spectroscopic analysis of materials. In later years, Bloembergen turned his attention to another aspect of laser research, the field of nonlinear optics...