Martinus J. G. Veltman

Martinus Justinus Godefriedus "Tini" Veltman (; 27 June 1931 – 4 January 2021) was a Dutch theoretical physicist. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with his former PhD student Gerardus 't Hooft for their work on particle theory.

Biography Martinus Justinus Godefriedus Veltman was born in Waalwijk, Netherlands, on 27 June 1931. His father was the head of the local primary school. Three of his father's siblings were primary school teachers. His mother's father was a contractor and also ran a café. He was the fourth child in a family with six children. He started studying mathematics and physics at Utrecht University in 1948.

As a youth he had a great interest in radio electronics, which was a difficult hobby to work on because the occupying German army had confiscated most of the available radio equipment. Renormalization of Yang–Mills theory is a major achievement of twentieth century physics.

In 1980, Veltman became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1981, Veltman left Utrecht University for the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, from where he retired in 1996. He subsequently moved back to the Netherlands.

In 1993 Veltman was awarded the High Energy Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society "for the role of massive Yang-Mills theories for weak interactions".

Eventually, he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1999 with 't Hooft, "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics".

Asteroid 9492 Veltman is named in his honor.