Martinus J. G. Veltman
Veltman, Martinus J. G. (1931-) was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in physics for his mathematical work on the characteristics of subatomic particles and the forces between them. He shared the prize with his colleague, Dutch physicist Gerardus 't Hooft.
Veltman was born in Waalwijk, the Netherlands. He studied physics at the University of Utrecht and completed his graduate work in 1956. After military service, he returned to the university and earned his Ph.D. degree in physics in 1963. From 1963 to 1966, he was a research fellow at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. He was professor of physics at the University of Utrecht from 1966 to 1981. In 1981 he was appointed John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he remained until his retirement in 1997.
In 1963, frustrated by the difficulty in performing complex algebraic equations for particle experiments, Veltman wrote a computer program called Schoonschip that was faster and essentially error-free. The program became the basis for a later program called Mathematica, which is used in physics and other scientific disciplines.
In the 1960's, physicists Sheldon Lee Glashow and Steven Weinberg of the United States and Abdus Salam of Pakistan developed the electroweak theory, which demonstrated the existence of subatomic particles called the w +, w -, and z. However, the theory offered no way to calculate the particles' characteristics, such as their mass.
In the late 1960's through the mid-1970's, Veltman and 't Hooft developed a program that provided a detailed mathematical method for calculating the characteristics of the particles. The accuracy of Veltman's program was instrumental in producing a subatomic particle called the top quark at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in Batavia, Illinois, in 1995.