A.J. Kox - Homepage

Prof. dr Anne J. Kox Pieter Zeeman Professor of History of Physics Institute for Theoretical Physics University of Amsterdam Science Park 904, C4-268 P.O. Box 94485 1090 GL Amsterdam The Netherlands tel: +31 20 525 5739/5773 email: a.j.kox "at" uva.nl

Although I am a regular member of the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of Amsterdam, as well as a theoretical physicist by training, I have been occupying myself full-time with history of science for many years. My research is officially part of the research program of the Institute. Since 1998 I hold the Pieter Zeeman Chair of History of Physics, which makes me the first professor of history of physics at the University of Amsterdam ever. I am also a member of the History Department of the Faculty of Humanities at this university. Click here for my homepage there. (Not that you'll see more than my picture...)

My current work has two points of focus. The first one is the history of Dutch physics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I am in particular interested in the work of the Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853–1928, Nobel Prize for Physics 1902, together with Pieter Zeeman). I am writing his biography and editing his scientific correspondence, the first volume of which has appeared in the fall of 2008. Go here for more on this volume. A second (and final) volume will appear in 2011.

The second topic is the work of Albert Einstein. Since as long ago as 1985 I have been connected with the Einstein Papers Project in various editorial capacities, first in Boston (at Boston University) and later in Pasadena, at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Right now I am Visiting Senior Editor at the Einstein Papers, as well as Visiting Associate in History at the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences of Caltech. These positions require my presence at Caltech for part of the year. In the past I have also done work on the history of General Relativity, among other things.

Volume 11 of the Einstein Papers (2009), of which I was the lead editor, has been awarded the Wheatley Medal of the British Society of Indexers. Here is more on the prize; for more on the book, and on Volume 12, which has also appeared in 2009 (and for which I was Associate Editor) go here.

In 2000 I received the rare honor of being elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. The citation reads: “For his original contributions to the history of physics, especially in the Netherlands, and for his extraordinary contributions to the edition of Albert Einstein’s papers.”

In the past years I have supervised two doctoral dissertations, one by Ad Maas (who is now at the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden) and the other one by Jeroen van Dongen. Maas’s dissertation deals with the history of physics at the University of Amsterdam between 1877 and 1940; Van Dongen, now Assistant Professor at the Institute for History and Foundations of Science of the University of Utrecht as well as part-time editor at the Einstein Papers Project, worked on the history of unified field theory, with special emphasis on Einstein’s contributions. For his dissertation he was awarded the Andreas Bonn medal by the Genootschap tot Bevordering van Natuur-, Genees- en Heelkunde. A revised version will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.

In the History Department I am currently supervising the doctoral dissertation of Pim Huijnen; his topic is the relation between university researchers and the industry, in particular in the food and pharmaceutical industry in the Netherlands in the inter-war period. In this project university historian P.J. Knegtmans is an important co-supervisor.

Together with my colleague and good friend Jean Eisenstaedt (Observatoire de Paris) I organized the Sixth International Conference on the History of General Relativity, which took place in Amsterdam from 26 to 29 June 2002. Go here for more information; the proceedings of the conference have appeared in 2005 (The Universe of General Relativity, A.J.Kox and J. Eisenstaedt, eds. Boston: Birkhaeuser, 2005). Recently, I was a co-organizer of the Second International Conference on the History of Quantum Physics (HQ2), which was held in Utrecht, 14–17 July 2008. Click here for more details. The proceedings will appear shortly as a special issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics (check here). The next meeting, HQ3, will take place in Berlin in 2010.