Mathematical physicist Klaas Landsman will be awarded the Dutch Research Council (NWO) Spinoza Prize for 2022. The Spinoza Prize is the highest distinction in Dutch academia. Landsman plans to use the money to examine the themes of coincidence, determinism and emergence more closely. He also aims to ensure that the study programme for first-degree mathematics teachers lays greater emphasis on philosophy and history. “Nobody really knows what I actually do,” Landsman says in explaining why he was so surprised to receive the call from NWO chair Marcel Levi informing him that he would be awarded this year’s Spinoza Prize. “I normally tell physicists that I’m involved in mathematics and philosophy, and I tell philosophers that I’m involved in physics and mathematics. And if I’m talking to a mathematician I’ll say that I’m involved in physics and philosophy.” Landsman obtained his PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Amsterdam in 1989, and subsequently trained as a mathematical physicist and mathematician in Cambridge and Hamburg. In 1990 he also became interested in the history and philosophy of mathematics and physics. “The time that I spent in Cambridge, between 1989 and 1997, was decisive for me. The people at the university were very generous and they allowed me to do whatever I wanted. I increasingly questioned what the fact that nature can be captured in mathematical formulas means, and that’s how my academic profile developed during that period. Even now, my work continues to focus on these types of questions.” Newton, coincidence and black holes It was also in Cambridge that Landsman developed a fascination for Isaac Newton. In 2005, he wrote the picaresque novel ‘Requiem for Newton’, in which he incorporated details about his own years at Cambridge. Like Landsman, Newton also had a broad interest in science, and even in theology. “I yearn for the time in which Newton lived; I’d really like to contribute to all areas of mathematics, physics and philosophy. That’s the direction I’d still like to explore, I don’t want to specialise exclusively.” In 2018, his public thesis ‘Naar alle Onwaarschijnlijkheid (In All Improbability)’ was published, a homage to coincidence, for which he received a great deal of media attention. “Thinking about coincidence and determinism and the role that mathematics plays has subsequently steered me more in the direction of black holes.” When the first image of the black hole in M87 was published in 2019, which was co-created by Heino Falcke, a colleague at Radboud University’s Institute for Mathematics, Astrophysics and Particle Physics (IMAPP), Landsman became even more fascinated by black holes. “Major questions about predictability, the discoverability of nature: with black holes these questions recur in an extreme way. It turns out that you’re also faced with a lot of philosophical questions. For example, what would physics say about you if you were to disappear into the horizon of a black hole?” Teaching Mathematics There are not many other people in the world like Landsman who approach physics and mathematics from a philosophical and historical perspective. “I see being involved in the foundations as an inspirational action. It fills me with a sense of happiness to know that I’m able to understand things a lot better. The whole process could be compared to making music.” But Landsman believes that it is not just a matter of beauty. “The basic mathematical ideas ultimately determine where we’re heading with technologies, and they are therefore highly influential. For example, take Alan Turing and John von Neumann. They were originally logicians. They understood the fundamentals of mathematics and so they were able to build the first computers. The quantum computer, if it is ever developed, will also be a consequence of fundamental debates about quantum mechanics, such as those that were once held between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr.” It is for this reason that Landsman would like to see more philosophy and history reflected in the way mathematics is currently being taught. “To be able to explain mathematics really well, you need to know what it is. What’s the truth, does the perfect circle exist or is what we see always an approximation? If we want to produce better mathematics teachers, we need to address these questions better. I want to use part of the money from the Spinoza Prize to address this.” “I’ve actually already started to tackle the issue in collaboration with the Radboud Graduate School of Education by giving a lecture on the subject. We’re going to start small by using the students in our own teacher training study programme, and we’ll see where we go from there. I’m also hoping to start a subproject, in which abstraction in mathematics and visual art can be compared historically and conceptually.” “I think the Spinoza Prize is an awful lot of money for one person, especially for a theoretician, and that’s a practice that I don’t actually condone. But the prize money will allow me to make a bold and significant contribution, both intellectually and socially, that would otherwise not be possible.” Photo: Dan-Cristian Pădureț via Unsplash