Yang–Mills theories met with general acceptance in the physics community after Gerard 't Hooft, in 1972, worked out their renormalization, relying on a formulation of the problem worked out by his advisor Martinus Veltman. Renormalizability is obtained even if the gauge bosons described by this theory are massive, as in the electroweak theory, provided the mass is only an "acquired" one, generated by the Higgs mechanism.