This book is the first thorough and overdue biography of one of the giants of science in the
twentieth century Jan Hendrik Oort. His fundamental contributions had a lasting effect on the
development of our insight and a profound influence on the international organization and
cooperation in his area of science and on the efforts and contribution of his native
country.This book aims at describing Oort's life and works in the context of the development of
his branch of science and as a tribute to a great scientist in a broader sense. The astronomer
Jan Hendrik Oort from the Netherlands was founder of studies of the structure and dynamics of
the Milky Way Galaxy initiator of radioastronomy and the European Southern Observatory and an
important contributor to many areas of astronomy from the study of comets to the universe on
the largest scales.
