Acknowledgments
Many people have made crucial contributions to the success of this project to
write a biography of Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn. The Springer Astrophysics
and Space Science Library version [5] has a more comprehensive summary
and I will limit myself somewhat here.
The ASSL version was partly the result of the insistence of Adriaan Blaauw,
third director of the Astronomical Laboratory in Groningen, that a comprehensive biography of Kapteyn should be written and that I should consider
doing that after my retirement. I am grateful he persisted in that opinion and
regret he never saw the result.
I would like to thank the ‘proeflezers’ (proofreaders; not in the sense of
proofs of printed texts, but of the Dutch ‘wijnproeven’, wine tasting) for
reading the original scientific biography in draft form and for commenting on
it. These include my colleague and astronomer Jan Willem Pel and historians
Klaas van Berkel and David Baneke. Also, my good friends Albert Jan Scheffer
and Ton Schoot Uiterkamp have read and commented on the manuscript of
the original book. And I also thank the proeflezers of the Dutch version for
a wider audience [6]. These are my wife Corry, and my very helpful good
friends Geert Hoornveld, Rob Knol and Albert Jan Scheffer. The work of all
my proeflezers has been accurate and excellent; for errors that may have been
overlooked, I am solely responsible.
Many thanks are also due to my editors of the previous versions, Jennifer
Satten of Springer and Inge van der Bijl at Amsterdam University Press. I
thank AUP also for releasing the rights on an English translation.
xvii
Many people have made crucial contributions to the success of this project to
write a biography of Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn. The Springer Astrophysics
and Space Science Library version [5] has a more comprehensive summary
and I will limit myself somewhat here.
The ASSL version was partly the result of the insistence of Adriaan Blaauw,
third director of the Astronomical Laboratory in Groningen, that a comprehensive biography of Kapteyn should be written and that I should consider
doing that after my retirement. I am grateful he persisted in that opinion and
regret he never saw the result.
I would like to thank the ‘proeflezers’ (proofreaders; not in the sense of
proofs of printed texts, but of the Dutch ‘wijnproeven’, wine tasting) for
reading the original scientific biography in draft form and for commenting on
it. These include my colleague and astronomer Jan Willem Pel and historians
Klaas van Berkel and David Baneke. Also, my good friends Albert Jan Scheffer
and Ton Schoot Uiterkamp have read and commented on the manuscript of
the original book. And I also thank the proeflezers of the Dutch version for
a wider audience [6]. These are my wife Corry, and my very helpful good
friends Geert Hoornveld, Rob Knol and Albert Jan Scheffer. The work of all
my proeflezers has been accurate and excellent; for errors that may have been
overlooked, I am solely responsible.
Many thanks are also due to my editors of the previous versions, Jennifer
Satten of Springer and Inge van der Bijl at Amsterdam University Press. I
thank AUP also for releasing the rights on an English translation.
xvii