Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis

Upon the completion of Huygens Collected Works in 1950, at the annual meeting of the Dutch Society of Sciences at Haarlem, Dijksterhuis spoke on the 60-year project.

The text of his speech was published in Centaurus in March 1953, when he gave a "sketch of the position occupied by Huygens in the scientific life of the 17th century."

The first characteristic entails that intellectual heights once reserved to the privileged few become in due time accessible to beginners; the second, that in the strict sense of the word no scientist works alone."

On Huygens' contribution to timekeeping, Dijksterhuis wrote, "he contrived to make the wheelwork of the clock keep up the motion of the pendulum, which on the other hand communicates to it its own periodicity, not materially changed by the connection."

In 1950 Dijkserhuis published De mechanisering van het wereldbeeld (Dutch language) which was positively reviewed in a French journal.