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Biography - Overview: The Curious Observer - Meet Antony van Leeuwenhoek, cloth merchant and haberdasher, citizen of Delft, member of a growing, prosperous family.

  • Antony - a list of short articles about Leeuwenhoek's life, as close to a traditional biography as this web gets.
  • Chronology - more than a hundred and fifty documented events in the life of Leeuwenhoek and his immediate family from his birth in 1632 to the auctioning of his microscopes in 1747 after his daughter's death. This is a sub-set of the comprehensive chronology that begins in 1246.
  • Portraits - a gallery of the few portraits of Leeuwenhoek and their variant versions, with close-ups. Clicking on the image itself starts a slide show in most browsers. Clicking on the text underneath each image displays a page with more info.
  • Homes - where Leeuwenhoek lived in Delft, Oosteinde as a boy and Hippolytusbuurt as an adult.
  • Legacy - articles about what Leeuwenhoek accomplished, how he was thought of by the people of his time, what happened to his magnifying glasses, and how we remember him today.

This section focuses on Leeuwenhoek's private life as opposed to this scientific life, which is covered elsewhere.