Prof. N.P. Landsman (Klaas)

Klaas Landsman (1963) has been Professor of Mathematical Physics at Radboud University since 2004. His PhD from 1989 (UvA) was on quantum field theory at high temperature. He spent 1989-1997 at the University of Cambridge (1993-94 at Hamburg), mainly working on the connection between classical and quantum physics using tools from non-commutative geometry. The results are in his monographs Mathematical Topics Between Classical and Quantum Mechanics (Springer, 1998) and Foundations of Quantum Theory: From Classical Concepts to Operator Algebras (Springer, 2017, Open Access), http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319517766. He then moved to general relativity, about which he wrote a textbook Foundations of General Relativity (Radboud University Press, Open Access, 2022), https://www.radbouduniversitypress.nl/site/books/m/10.54195/EFVF4478/. His current aim is to work on black hole thermodynamics and the foundations of statistical mechanics. He was EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow (UK), Alexander von Humboldt Fellow (Germany), KNAW Research Fellow (Netherlands) and NWO Pioneer (dito). In 2011 he received a TOP-GO award from NWO. He is a member of the KNAW (2019) and the KHMW (2021). In 2020 he won the FQXi Essay Contest, and in 2022 he won the Spinoza Prize (the highest scientific award in the Netherlands). Besides mathematical physics he is also active in pure mathematics and in the history and philosophy of physics. He wrote four monographs, two popular science books, nearly one hundred peer-reviewed papers and book chapters, and nearly 50 popular articles. He has trained 15 PhD students and 30 Master students. He co-founded the Institute for Mathematics, Astrophysics and Particle Physics (IMAPP), the national mathematics cluster Geometry and Quantum Theory (GQT), the Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena (DIEP), and the National Science Agenda route Building Blocks of Matter and Foundations of Space and Time. Today he is building a Radboud Center for Natural Philosophy.