Jan Tinbergen

Dutch economist and physicist, Noble Prize winner, one of the founding fathers of econometrics. He was the eldest son of Dr. Dirk Cornelis Tinbergen (8 May 1874, Den Haag - 12 Febr 1951, Den Haag), a teacher of Dutch letters at the gymnasium and Jeanette van Eek (30 April 1877 - 10 Sept 1960, Den Haag), a Remonstrant teacher. They married 23 July 1902 in Den Haag and got four sons and a daughter. All five children were very intelligent and got an academic degree, three of them became a professor, of which two were awarded the Noble prize: Jan Tinbergen in 1969 for economics and the Oxford professor of ethology and teacher of Richard Dawkins, Nico Tinbergen (15 April 1907, Den Haag – 21 December 1988, Oxford ) for Physiology and Medicine in 1973. Their youngest brother Luuk Tinbergen died early (7 September 1915, Den Haag - 1 September 1955, Groningen). But as a prominent Dutch professor in ornithology and ecologist, he certainly influenced his two Nobel Prize winning elder brothers and indirectly many others.

Tinbergen's father stimulated the learning of foreign languages and science of his children. His mother, who had been a teacher of fisherman children in Scheveningen, brought them into contact with the world of the poor and orphaned. During WWI the family hosted Austrian refugee children. Tinbergen was stimulated to work hard to improve his and the outside him existing world, but he also knew that this could not achieved by only for themselves working individuals. He early learned to have a social feeling and the need to co-operate.

Tinbergen followed the HBS in Den Haag, where he met his spouse Tine. In 1921 Tinbergen studied Mathematics and Physics at Leiden University. After his Candidate exam in December 1922 he became an assistant of the quantum mechanics professor Paul Ehrenfest (18 Jan 1880, Wien - 25 September 1933, Amsterdam).