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The Kramers chair of Theoretical Physics
 Professor Hendrik Anthony KramersThe Dutch scientist HENDRIK ANTHONY KRAMERS was born in 1894 and studied physics in Leiden with Ehrenfest. In 1916 he became a student of Niels Bohr and later his trusted assistant and collaborator. It was said that Kramers was the representative of Bohr on earth. He was deeply involved with the early development of quantum mechanics and wrote in 1925 with Heisenberg the seminal paper on scattering of light by atoms. In 1926 he moved to Utrecht to take the chair of theoretical physics. Kramers (Photo NTvN-1996/6) was the first in the Netherlands to teach the new quantum mechanics. In a series of papers he produced a number of applications of it, some of which became classics, such as his derivation of the zero point energy 1/2hn. Others dealt with molecules and ions, and with magnetism. At the same time as Kronig he derived the famous dispersion relations.In 1934 he was selected as the successor to Ehrenfest in Leiden, on the prestigious chair of Lorentz, where he wrote a remarkable textbook on quantum mechanics. He also got involved with statistical mechanics and in 1940 he published a paper on unimolecular chemical reactions, which was the subject of two conferences half a century later. At the Van der Waals conference in 1937 he saved the situation by formulating the thermodynamic limit. All his life he struggled with the interaction between particles and light; at the Shelter Island conference in 1946 he launched the idea of renormalisation, without which no field theory is possible. Yet this formal solution did not satisfy him, but he never found a better one.
Kramers loved music and literature, but above all physics. He did research because he was fascinated by it, not for public
acclaim. His colleagues and students knew that he was a great man, but his fame penetrated
only slowly to the outside world. Yet after the war he was elected as chairman of the
technical subcommittee of the International Atomic Energy Commission. He also organized
the building of a nuclear reactor using Dutch uranium and Norwegian heavy water, and he
was at the cradle of the FOM.
He was amazingly active and generously contributed to the scientific life at the Institute for Theoretical
Physics. Numerous were the discussions on various aspects of physics and on the subjects
that the members of the Institute were concerned with. He made a lasting impression on
those who were there at the time. In addition he was invited for a number of talks at
other universities in Holland and elsewhere. He even met with several authorities on the
subject of Civil Defense. His impressive knowledge and unassuming personality are
remembered by all those who were present at the time.
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