Gerard 't Hooft

't Hooft has "deviating views on the physical interpretation of quantum theory". He believes that there could be a deterministic explanation underlying quantum mechanics. Using a speculative model he has argued that such a theory could avoid the usual Bell inequality arguments that would disallow such a local hidden variable theory. In 2016 he published a book length exposition of his ideas which, according to 't Hooft, has encountered mixed reactions.

The world took little notice, but Veltman was excited because he saw that the problem he had been working on was solved. A period of intense collaboration followed in which they developed the technique of dimensional regularization. Soon 't Hooft's second paper was ready to be published, in which he showed that Yang–Mills theories with massive fields due to spontaneous symmetry breaking could be renormalized. This paper earned them worldwide recognition, and would ultimately earn the pair the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics.

On July 1, 2011 he was appointed Distinguished professor by Utrecht University.

In 2007 't Hooft became editor-in-chief for Foundations of Physics, where he sought to distance the journal from the controversy of ECE theory. 't Hooft held the position until 2016.

In 1999 't Hooft shared the Nobel prize in Physics with his thesis adviser Veltman for "elucidating the quantum structure of the electroweak interactions in physics". Before that time his work had already been recognized by other notable awards. In 1981, he was awarded the Wolf Prize, possibly the most prestigious prize in physics after the Nobel prize. Five years later he received the Lorentz Medal, awarded every four years in recognition of the most important contributions in theoretical physics. In 1995, he was one of the first recipients of the Spinozapremie, the highest award available to scientists in the Netherlands. In the same year he was also honoured with a Franklin Medal. In 2000, 't Hooft received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

In 1986, he was finally able to show that instanton contributions solve the Adler–Bell–Jackiw anomaly, the topic of his master's thesis.

He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) since 1982, where he was made academy professor in 2003. He is also a foreign member of many other science academies, including the French Académie des Sciences, the American National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Britain and Ireland based Institute of Physics.

In the 1980s, 't Hooft's attention was drawn to the subject of gravity in 3 spacetime dimensions. Together with Deser and Jackiw he published an article in 1984 describing the dynamics of flat space where the only local degrees of freedom were propagating point defects. His attention returned to this model at various points in time, showing that Gott pairs would not cause causality violating timelike loops, and showing how the model could be quantized. More recently he proposed generalizing this piecewise flat model of gravity to 4 spacetime dimensions.

In 1974, 't Hooft returned to Utrecht where he became assistant professor. In 1976, he was invited for a guest position at Stanford and a position at Harvard as Morris Loeb lecturer. His eldest daughter, Saskia Anne, was born in Boston, while his second daughter, Ellen Marga, was born in 1978 after he returned to Utrecht, where he was made full professor. In the academic year 1987-1988 't Hooft spent a sabbatical in the Boston University Physics Department along with Howard Georgi, Robert Jaffe and others arranged by the then new Department chair Lawrence Sulak.

When 't Hooft mentioned his results at a small conference at Marseilles in 1972, Kurt Symanzik urged him to publish this result; but 't Hooft did not, and the result was eventually rediscovered and published by Hugh David Politzer, David Gross, and Frank Wilczek in 1973, which led to their earning the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In 1969, 't Hooft started on his doctoral research with Martinus Veltman as his advisor. He would work on the same subject Veltman was working on, the renormalization of Yang–Mills theories. In 1971 his first paper was published. In it he showed how to renormalize massless Yang–Mills fields, and was able to derive relations between amplitudes, which would be generalized by Andrei Slavnov and John C. Taylor, and become known as the Slavnov–Taylor identities.

In the course of his studies he decided he wanted to go into what he perceived as the heart of theoretical physics, elementary particles. His uncle had grown to dislike the subject and in particular its practitioners, so when it became time to write his 'doctoraalscriptie' (former name of the Dutch equivalent of a master's thesis) in 1968, 't Hooft turned to the newly appointed professor Martinus Veltman, who specialized in Yang–Mills theory, a relatively fringe subject at the time because it was thought that these could not be renormalized. His assignment was to study the Adler–Bell–Jackiw anomaly, a mismatch in the theory of the decay of neutral pions; formal arguments forbid the decay into photons, whereas practical calculations and experiments showed that this was the primary form of decay. The resolution of the problem was completely unknown at the time, and 't Hooft was unable to provide one.

After Gerard 't Hooft passed his high school exams in 1964, he enrolled in the physics program at Utrecht University. He opted for Utrecht instead of the much closer Leiden, because his uncle was a professor there and he wanted to attend his lectures. Because he was so focused on science, his father insisted that he join the Utrechtsch Studenten Corps, a student association, in the hope that he would do something else besides studying. This worked to some extent, during his studies he was a coxswain with their rowing club "Triton" and organized a national congress for science students with their science discussion club "Christiaan Huygens".

Gerard 't Hooft was born on July 5, 1946 in Den Helder, Noord-Holland, Netherlands.