1. Robbert Dijkgraaf served as the Minister of Education, Culture and Science in the Netherlands from 2022 until 2024.
20 Facts About Robbert Dijkgraaf
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Robertus Henricus Robbert Dijkgraaf was born on 24 January 1960 in Ridderkerk, Netherlands.
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Robbert Dijkgraaf started his education in physics at Utrecht University in 1978.
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Robbert Dijkgraaf then went on to performing doctoral research under supervision of future Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft.
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Robbert Dijkgraaf studied together with the twins Erik and Herman Verlinde.
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Robbert Dijkgraaf's thesis was titled A Geometrical Approach to Two Dimensional Conformal Field Theory.
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Robbert Dijkgraaf was elected as one of the two co-chairs of the InterAcademy Council for the period 2009 to 2013.
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Robbert Dijkgraaf has served on numerous boards including at the Teylers Museum and the NEMO Science Museum.
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Robbert Dijkgraaf regularly appears on Dutch television and has a monthly column in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad.
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Robbert Dijkgraaf introduced the Balanced Internationalisation Act in the House of Representatives in 2024.
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In 1998 Robbert Dijkgraaf was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin.
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Robbert Dijkgraaf used part of his Spinoza Prize grant to set up a website targeted at children and promoting science: Proefjes.
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Robbert Dijkgraaf is an elected Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2003 and of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities.
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On 5 June 2012, Robbert Dijkgraaf was appointed a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion.
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Robbert Dijkgraaf was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in the disciplines of informatics, mathematics and statistics in 2013.
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Robbert Dijkgraaf received honorary doctorates from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Leiden University in 2019.
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Robbert Dijkgraaf's research focuses on string theory and the interface of mathematics and physics in general.
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Robbert Dijkgraaf is best known for his work on topological string theory and matrix models, and his name has been given to the Dijkgraaf-Witten invariants and the Witten-Dijkgraaf-Verlinde-Verlinde formula.
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Robbert Dijkgraaf is married to the author Pia de Jong and has three children.
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Robbert Dijkgraaf has co-authored and published more than 70 research articles in the field of string theory and physics, with many other researchers including: Cumrun Vafa, Lotte Hollands, Erik Verlinde, Herman Verlinde, Hirosi Ooguri, Gregory Moore, Rajesh Gopakumar, Sergei Gukov, Miranda Cheng, and others.