Willem Jacob van Stockum

Willem Jacob van Stockum (November 20, 1910-June 10, 1944) was a physicist who made important contributions to the early development of general relativity.

Van Stokum was born in Hattem in the Netherlands. His father, a mechanically talented officer in the Dutch Royal Navy, was a cousin of Vincent van Gogh. His mother came from a prominent Irish family. After the family (less the father) relocated to Ireland in the late 1920s, Willem studied mathematics at the Trinity College (Dublin University), where we earned a gold medal. He went on to graduate work at the University of Edinburgh, where he became an early enthusiast of the then new theory of gravitation, general relativity.

In 1937, he published a paper which contains one of the first exact solutions in general relativity which modeled the gravitational field produced by a configuration of rotating matter, the van Stockum dust, which remains an important example noted for its unusual simplicity.

Van Stockum eventually left for the United States in hope of studying under Albert Einstein himself, which unfortunately failed to transpire. The outbreak of the Second World War occurred while he was teaching in the United States. Anxious to join the fight against Hitler, he joined the Canadian Army, eventually earning his pilots wings in July 1942. Because of his advanced knowledge of physics, he spent much of the next year as a test pilot in Canada, which must have been vexatious, because van Stockum personally knew many persons who were suffering under Nazi occupation. Finally, in 1944, Flying Officer Van Stockum became the only Dutch officer posted to No. 10 Squadron of the RAF Bomber Command, which was stationed in Yorkshire and flew combat missions in the Halifax heavy bomber over Europe.

On June 10, 1944, van Stockum and his crew took off for his sixth combat mission as part of a 400 plane raid. Near their target, the plane was hit by flak, and all seven crew members were lost. They are buried near where their plane went down.