A look back at Professor Moerdijk's valedictory lecture

Distinguished University Professor and Spinoza Prize laureate Ieke Moerdijk delivered his valedictory lecture at Utrecht University on Friday 22 May. On the same day, he was appointed Order of the Lion of the Netherlands. Such a great honour!

Moerdijk is an internationally renowned mathematician who made fundamental contributions to mathematical logic, geometry and topology and category theory. He also helped forge important and sometimes unexpected connections between these fields.  

Over the course of his career, he has written several authoritative books and numerous scientific publications. He received a range of prestigious distinctions, including the Spinoza Prize, the highest scientific honour in the Netherlands.

During the lecture, Moerdijk offered a glimpse into the mathematics that has occupied him over the past four decades. In recent years, his work has focused on topology, an abstract branch of geometry concerned with understanding and characterising shapes and structures.

Although topology may seem highly abstract, it underpins virtually all areas of mathematics. The field also plays an important role in applications ranging from robotics and image processing to climate research and epidemiology, where classical mathematical techniques are frequently revived and reused. Beyond his own research, Moerdijk was deeply committed to promoting mathematics both within the university and beyond. The lecture series he organised frequently sparked unexpected collaborations across disciplinary boundaries.

Moerdijk has used the Spinoza Prize primarily to revive algebraic topology, a field that had virtually disappeared from the Netherlands. He is characteristically modest but nevertheless argues that his group is now among the strongest centres for algebraic topology in Europe.

Throughout his career, Moerdijk also held visiting positions at leading universities worldwide and received several distinguished academic honours, including election to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW - Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen) and the Academia Europaea. He was also actively involved in academic governance and administration. From 2008 to 2011, for instance, he served as Vice-Dean for Research at the Faculty of Science at Utrecht University. In 2015, he was a member of the committee that, at the request of Minister Jet Bussemaker, transformed the Vision Document of the Platform Wiskunde Nederland into the Delta Plan for Dutch Mathematics. 

The Faculty of Science expresses its deep gratitude for his contributions and wishes him a well-deserved retirement as emeritus professor.