The Mechanization of the World Picture [antikvár]

FOREWORD Was man in der Jugend wünscht, hat man im Alter die Fülle. Goethe* Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis was born October 20, 1892, in the Dutch city of Tilburg, the son of Dr. Berend Dijksterhuis and Gezina Eerkes. The father, director of the local high school, now King William II Lyceum, was also a local historian, for whom a street in Tilburg was named. After graduation from this school, he studied Latin and Greek for the state examination then to be passed for admission to the university (only modern languages were taught in high school), a necessary condition at that time. He wavered between the humanities and the exact sciences, but decided for the latter. This led to the doctor's degree in mathematics at Groningen; the thesis dealt with plane screw theory, an extension of vector analysis. This was in 1918. From 1915 on he had been teaching mathematics and physics at the high school in Groningen. In 1919 he returned to the same function at his old high school in Tilburg. Here he taught for thirty-four years—until 1953. He married Johanna Ka-thinka Elizabeth Niemeyer; they had one daughter and two sons. He is remembered as a conscientious instructor, presenting his topics "along lines of perfect logic"—to quote a colleague—and making rather high demands, so that in later years only higher grades were assigned to him. I do not think that he ever suffered fools gladly, and he always was a very reserved man, but he earned the deep respect of all who knew him—pupils, friends, colleagues. His weakness was in experiments, but happily he had a good atnanuensis to help him across. He never forgot his love for the humanities, not just as a complement, but as an integral element of his love for the exact sciences and their history. This fascination found its outlet in several directions, for he was a man of parts. Throughout his career two of these stood out: the search for the ways by which, throughout the ages, modern physical theory as formulated in Newton's laws came into being; and secondly, the narrowing of the gap between the humanities and the exact sciences, between the "two cultures" of C. P. Snow, or the "a- and ß-fields," as the Dutch say. We owe to these investigations many publications in essay and book form, almost all in Dutch, the language he loved and mastered so well. * "What we wish in our youth, we have abundantly in old age"—quoted by Dijksterhuis in lecture of 1953.