The Beginning Years

Abstract

So passed his wonderful student days. My father had worked hard, the doctoral exam was done cum laude, and on 24 January 1875 he was conferred his doctor’s degree in mathematics and physics based on his thesis, ‘Investigation of the Vibration of a Membrane’. For the first time, father had to deal with the issue of what he wanted to become. His father had already decided that his son, my father, should become a teacher. But my father wanted nothing to do with that. ‘Teacher at a school?’ Although his father was very angry at this rejection, my father felt that that was neither his calling nor what suited him. The teaching profession was something that the Kapteyns had ingrained in us children since birth, but it was time that the younger Kapteyn realized that he would now have to find his own way through life.