Burchard de Volder

Burchard de Volder was a Dutch physicist, born in 1643 into a Mennonite family in Amsterdam and dead in 1709. He took a master's degree in philosophy at Utrecht in 1660 and a medical doctorate at Leiden in 1664, and became professor of physics at Leiden University in 1670. Through his efforts a physics laboratory was set up at Leiden in 1675, where he gathered measuring instruments of every kind and gave demonstrations, particularly of the discoveries of Robert Boyle; the laboratory was unique for its time. He drew many foreign students, among them Herman Boerhaave, and is remembered as one of the most important philosophical correspondents of Gottfried Leibniz.