tant advisory body for the Dutch government and the scientific world and it also promotes international collaboration.
It was founded on 8 May 1808 by Louis Napoleon, Napoleon Bonaparte's younger brother who was King of Holland from 1806 to 1810. He thought it high time that the Netherlands should have its own learned society along the lines of the Institut de France in Paris. But although the Royal Institute was inspired by the French model, it was nevertheless the outcome of the Dutch tradition of scientific scholarship and can be seen as a compromise between differing Dutch views of the importance of science. The aim of the Royal Institute was ‘to perfect the Sciences and Arts, to inform foreigners of such progress and to introduce inventions or progress achieved elsewhere into our own country’. From 1812 the Royal Institute was located in the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam. This seventeenth-century house had been built by the arms dealers Louys and Hendrik Trip, and their family lived there until the beginning of the nineteenth century. From 1817 to 1885 the Trippenhuis also housed the national museum, the Rijksmuseum.
The Royal institute continued to exist after the French departed, but around 1850 the Dutch government desperately needed to save money and the institute lost more than half its funding. The ensuing wrangle led the government to dissolve the Institute and set up the Royal Academy of Sciences whose aim was to ‘promote Mathematics and Physics’. A few years later, this was expanded to include the ‘promotion of the linguistic, literary, historical and philosophical sciences’. The two Divisions of Natuurkunde (Physics) and Letterkunde (Literature) still exist today. Meanwhile, the Academy's budget has expanded hugely, to around 134 million Euros in 2006.
The start of the twentieth century was a golden age for Dutch science and several members of the Academy were awarded Nobel prizes. Not that much attention was paid to the Nobel prizes initially; they are mentioned rather in passing in the Academy's minutes. To date a total of seventeen members of the Academy have won Nobel prizes. In 1909 the KNAW obtained its first research institute: the Netherlands Institute for Neurosciences. Today seventeen institutes are affiliated to the KNAW. They carry out fundamental research in the life sciences, humanities and social sciences and are located in various places across the Netherlands.
As is appropriate for a ‘learned society’ the KNAW has expressed its opinions on all kinds of issues facing society: for instance, on the spontaneous combustion of coal (1857), on terrestrial radiation (1951) or on the decline in the number of science students (1997). Giving advice, whether solicited or not, is regarded by the Academy as one of the reasons for its existence. In order to perform its advisory task properly, the Academy has established a series of advisory councils in every field of scientific study. In addition to its own members, scientists working at universities, research institutes and in industry are invited to join these bodies, guaranteeing the involvement of a wide circle of experts in the Academy's activities.
As mentioned above, the Academy has two divisions, entitled the Literary Division (Letterkunde) and the Physics Division (Natuurkunde). These titles are somewhat misleading since ‘Literature’ includes the Humanities, Law, History and the Behavioural and Social Sciences, while the ‘Physics’ division also includes life sciences and technology. In 1973 the office of President was created as intermediary between the two. The president is appointed for three years, and acts more or less as the official spokesman for the Dutch scientific world. The current president is Frits van Oostrom, a man of letters who is well-known to the public through his book on the medieval writer Jacob van Maerlant. In May 2008 he will be succeeded by the mathematician Robbert Dijkgraaf.
The KNAW has traditionally played an active role in promoting international contacts and collaborative initiatives. It does so by entering into agreements with sister academies both in Europe and beyond, by collaborating with European or global organisations, and by participating in collaborative programmes. Each year it finances six Colloquia - scientific conferences for prominent researchers from home and abroad. It provides grants for research visits and ex-