Personality and Style

Abstract

There are only a few times when the overall contributions of a scientist are assessed and recorded. Such evaluations are inevitably made whenever a scientist receives an award, an honorary degree, or is otherwise publicly recognized for his or her achievements. Another more common, but unfortunately more melancholy occasion arises on the termination of a career and a life. Indeed, obituaries are often a better source of scientific accomplishments than encyclopedias. For Kramers, the major awards, the Lorentz medal in 1948, the Hughes medal in 1951, came very near the end of his life in April 1952. It is therefore not surprising that the congratulating lecture by van der Waals on the occasion of the award of the Lorentz medal¹ contains the same enumeration of Kramers’ scientific achievements as the later eulogies by Casimir,² Bohr,³ Belinfante and ter Haar,^4,5 and John Wheeler.⁶ Kramers’ scientific works (not counting popular lectures or summarizing talks) contain some 16 papers on the Bohr theory (all written before quantum mechanics) and 13 papers on the mathematical elaborations and formal consequences of quantum mechanics. He published some 21 papers in a different area: magnetic and low-temperature phenomena. In addition, Kramers became very interested in the formal property of the spin, resulting in some 11 papers. Kramers’ versatility is further evident in his 15 papers in statistical mechanics, the Ising model, and Brownian motion.