Martinus Veltman needed five years to pass a university examination normally reached after three and for much of that time, physics had barely captured his interest.

He had narrowly passed his secondary-school final examination in 1948. Because of his low grades, entry into technical college was uncertain until his physics teacher personally visited his parents and urged them to send him to university instead.

At Utrecht University, Veltman found the postwar teaching uninspiring. He commuted three hours each day, later worked alongside his studies, and sometimes struggled to afford proper meals.

In his Nobel autobiography, he described the period plainly:

“After three quite mediocre years…”

Veltman admitted that he spent much of this time drifting rather than working seriously. He eventually passed the candidaats examination after five years, two years later than normal.

Then he discovered a popular book about relativity. No university teacher had previously introduced the subject to him. Excited, he obtained Einstein’s The Meaning of Relativity from the theoretical-physics institute.

“Since then I was hooked,” he later wrote.

Veltman moved from experimental work into theoretical particle physics, where he developed powerful computational methods and worked with his student Gerard ’t Hooft to establish the mathematical consistency of electroweak theory.

He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with ’t Hooft for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions.

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