I’d like to share my Master’s thesis, recently completed at Utrecht University. Instead of discussing the scientific content, I must here make a serious statement — the one written, word for word, as the Acknowledgements of my thesis:

I would like to acknowledge Walter Rudin and Lev Landau as intellectual and moral role models. I learned much of my analysis from Rudin’s textbooks and much of my theoretical physics from the Landau–Lifshitz courses. Their writings taught me not only techniques, but a standard of clarity, courage, and seriousness in science.

Walter Rudin was born into a Jewish family in Vienna. After the Anschluss of 1938, when anti-Jewish persecution began immediately, he and his sister were sent to safety in Switzerland; the family later regathered in France, only to be uprooted again by its collapse in 1940. Rudin volunteered for the French Army and was assigned to a labour corps of foreign refugees under Army control at Pontivy, in Brittany. As France fell he walked out of Pontivy, crossed the collapsing country, and one week later sailed for Britain from Saint-Jean-de-Luz amid the evacuation of Polish troops — helped, as he recalled, by the kindness of ordinary people and by his own determination not to quit. He went on to serve in the British Pioneer Corps and later in the Royal Navy. His life reminds me that mathematical clarity and historical darkness are not separate worlds.

Lev Landau, contrary to his later stereotype as a loyal patriarch of Soviet science, was born into a Jewish family in Baku and became one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the twentieth century — and he opposed Stalinist repression. In 1938 he was arrested by the NKVD in connection with a leaflet that likened Stalinism to German Nazism and Italian fascism. He spent a year in prison and was released only through the persistent efforts of Pyotr Kapitza, who vouched for him personally, and the intervention of Niels Bohr. His fate reminds me that intellectual greatness does not require submission to tyranny.

For these reasons, I regard opposition to the far-right, ultranationalist, expansionist, racial-supremacist, and totalitarian ideologies embodied by the Axis powers — and to totalitarian rule in every form — as a non-negotiable principle. I likewise regard the defence of the norm that borders must never be redrawn by force, of human rights, and of academic freedom as inseparable from the responsibility of a scientist. These principles are rooted, for me, in the British constitutional tradition, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Atlantic Charter, and the Declaration by United Nations. No academic hierarchy, personal relationship, or career consideration can justify compromising them. When they are challenged, I will take guidance, inter alia, from Walter Rudin, from Lev Landau, and from the Dutch resistance (het Nederlandse verzet), and I will defend them clearly, firmly, and without apology — echoing the language of the 1942 Declaration: with my full resources, intellectual, moral, and lawful, and with all the courage I can summon.