Frederik Jozef Belinfante was a Dutch physicist and a professor at Purdue University. He was a proponent of the hidden variable interpretation of quantum mechanics. Belinfante was born in the Hague and was a student of H. A. Kramers at Leiden University. His Ph.D. thesis, published in 1939, is called 'Theory of Heavy Quanta'. Belinfante emigrated to Vancouver in 1946 and became an associate professor at the University of British Columbia. Two years later, in 1948, he moved to the United States and became a professor at Purdue. There, he studied quantum theory and cosmology.