Editing Hendrik Lorentz (section)

===Civil work===
After World War I, Lorentz was one of the driving forces behind the founding of the "Wetenschappelijke Commissie van Advies en Onderzoek in het Belang van Volkswelvaart en Weerbaarheid", a committee which was to harness the scientific potential united in the [[Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences]] (KNAW) for solving civil problems such as food shortage which had resulted from the war. Lorentz was appointed chair of the committee. However, despite the best efforts of many of the participants the committee would harvest little success. The only exception being that it ultimately resulted in the founding of TNO, the [[Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research]].<ref name="NtvN2011"/>

Lorentz was also asked by the Dutch government to chair a committee to calculate some of the effects of the proposed [[Afsluitdijk]] (Enclosure Dam) flood control dam on water levels in the {{lang|nl|[[Waddenzee]]|italic=no}}. [[Hydraulic engineering]] was mainly an empirical science at that time, but the disturbance of the tidal flow caused by the Afsluitdijk was so unprecedented that the empirical rules could not be trusted. Originally Lorentz was only supposed to have a coordinating role in the committee, but it quickly became apparent that Lorentz was the only physicist to have any fundamental traction on the problem. In the period 1918 till 1926, Lorentz invested a large portion of his time in the problem.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.radionetherlandsarchives.org/lorentz-the-grand-old-man-of-physics/|title=Lorentz: the Grand Old Man of Physics|work=Radio Netherlands Archives |date=13 March 2000}}</ref> Lorentz proposed to start from the basic [[hydrodynamic]] equations of motion and solve the problem numerically. This was feasible for a "[[human computer]]", because of the quasi-one-dimensional nature of the water flow in the {{lang|nl|Waddenzee|italic=no}}. The Afsluitdijk was completed in 1932, and the predictions of Lorentz and his committee turned out to be remarkably accurate.<ref >{{cite web|url=http://ilorentz.org/history/zuiderzee/zuiderzee.html |title=Carlo Beenakker |publisher=Ilorentz.org |access-date=1 February 2012}}</ref><ref name="NtvN2011"/> One of the two sets of locks in the Afsluitdijk was named after him.