Alexander Ollongren

Alexander Ollongren (born 1928) is a professor emeritus at Leiden University.

Alexander Ollongren was born in 1928 on a coffee plantation in Kepahiang, in the southwestern part of Sumatra, Netherlands East Indies. His father, Alexander Ollongren (1901–1989), was a Russian of Finnish-Swedish descent and a member of the Finnish noble family, , and his mother, Selma Hedwig Adèle Jaeger (1901–2000), was a Dutch-German. The family moved to Java in 1932 and lived in Jokjakarta, Central Java, while the Japanese army occupied the Netherlands East Indies in 1942. In 1945, he was interned and barely survived the Japanese concentration camp of Ngawi in Eastern Java. After the war, he graduated in early 1947 from high school in Batavia, now known as Jakarta, in Western Java. The family stayed in Australia for six months in order to recuperate, and while there, Ollongren considered enrolling at Sydney University. He decided instead to enter Leiden University in The Netherlands in 1947.

His university education at Leiden started with undergraduate and graduate studies in mathematics, Hamiltonian mechanics, physics, and astronomy, after which he gained his MSc degree in 1955. After completing his master's degree, he served almost two years in the military.

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