10
Statistics and Other Concerns
I couldn’t claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys
– but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!
Richard Phillips Feynman (1918–1988)
One has to be unselfish to a certain extent...
if only out of selfishness.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916)
After his last visit to Pasadena and Mount Wilson and the problematic return to
Groningen in January 1915, Kapteyn was almost 64. Normally he would have
more than six years to go before his retirement; this was in those days effected
at the end of the academic year in which the person involved reached the age of
seventy. His children had left the household already for some time. We already
saw that the youngest, Gerrit Jacobus, was now a mining engineer and lived in
Colorado. The second daughter, Henriette Mariette Augustine Albertine, was
married to Ejnar Hertzsprung, who had returned to Potsdam after his stay on
Mount Wilson and they had settled there together after their marriage. The
war made contact between the Hertzsprungs and the Kapteyns more difficult,
but since the Netherlands had remained neutral, this was still relatively easy.
The eldest daughter, Jacoba Cornelia, had completed her medical studies and
in 1906 had married Willem Cornelis Noordenbos, who had also studied
The quote is from Richard Feynman’s Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach was an Austrian writer.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license
to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
P. C. van der Kruit, Pioneer of Galactic Astronomy: A Biography of Jacobus C. Kapteyn,
Springer Biographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55423-1_10
203
Statistics and Other Concerns
I couldn’t claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys
– but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!
Richard Phillips Feynman (1918–1988)
One has to be unselfish to a certain extent...
if only out of selfishness.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916)
After his last visit to Pasadena and Mount Wilson and the problematic return to
Groningen in January 1915, Kapteyn was almost 64. Normally he would have
more than six years to go before his retirement; this was in those days effected
at the end of the academic year in which the person involved reached the age of
seventy. His children had left the household already for some time. We already
saw that the youngest, Gerrit Jacobus, was now a mining engineer and lived in
Colorado. The second daughter, Henriette Mariette Augustine Albertine, was
married to Ejnar Hertzsprung, who had returned to Potsdam after his stay on
Mount Wilson and they had settled there together after their marriage. The
war made contact between the Hertzsprungs and the Kapteyns more difficult,
but since the Netherlands had remained neutral, this was still relatively easy.
The eldest daughter, Jacoba Cornelia, had completed her medical studies and
in 1906 had married Willem Cornelis Noordenbos, who had also studied
The quote is from Richard Feynman’s Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach was an Austrian writer.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license
to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
P. C. van der Kruit, Pioneer of Galactic Astronomy: A Biography of Jacobus C. Kapteyn,
Springer Biographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55423-1_10
203