Origins
Born in The Hague, Netherlands, he is also noted as the brother of Jan Tinbergen, who won the first Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. He had a third eminent brother, Luuk Tinbergen who committed suicide in 1955 at age 39.
Tinbergen's interest in nature manifested itself when he was young. He studied biology at Leiden University and was a prisoner of war during World War II. Tinbergen's experience as a prisoner of the Nazis led to some friction with longtime intellectual collaborator Konrad Lorenz, and it was several years before the two reconciled. After the war, Tinbergen moved to England, where he taught at the University of Oxford. Several of his Oxford graduate students went on to become prominent biologists; these include Richard Dawkins, Marian Dawkins, Desmond Morris, and Iain Douglas Hamilton.
He married Elisabeth Rutten and they had five children. Later in life he suffered depression and feared he might, like his brother, commit suicide. He was treated by his friend, whose ideas he had greatly influenced, John Bowlby. Tinbergen died on 21 December 1988, after suffering a stroke at his home in Oxford, England.
Read more about this topic: Nikolaas Tinbergen
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