ABSTRACT
To an outsider, Robbert Dijkgraaf's career might appear as one long series of successes: professor of physics, public favourite on radio and television, president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, director of the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, minister of education and science in the cabinet of Prime Minister Mark Rutte (2022–24), and now president of the International Science Council and back in Amsterdam as university professor of science and society at the UvA. Yet Dijkgraaf would rather describe his fulfilling career as a zigzag path. ‘In retrospect, everyone typically has only one or two turning points in their career,’ he reflects.
