Johannes Diderik van der Waals biography, high resolution photos and videos by Americola 
Johannes Diderik van der Waals
[edit] Americola's celebrity biographies are provided by AmericolaWiki, a celebrity wiki. You can help contribute to Americola and edit this article.
Johannes Diderik van der Waals (November 23, 1837 – March 8, 1923) was a Dutch scientist and thermodynamicist famous for his work on the equation of state for gases and liquids and for his development of theory of intermolecular forces, also called van der Waals forces, which established the relationship between the pressure, volume, and temperature of gases and liquids. Van der Waals found his incentive for his life's work after reading an 1857 treatise by Rudolf Clausius concerning the nature of the motion called heat.[1] Van der Waals was later greatly influenced by the writings of James Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann, and Willard Gibbs. For his work he won the 1910 Nobel Prize in physics.
Contents
- 1 Family
- 2 Biography
- 3 See also
- 4 References
- 5 Further reading
- 6 External links
|
Family
Biography
Van der Waals was born in Leiden, the Netherlands, as the son of Jacobus van der Waals and Elisabeth van den Burg. He became a school teacher, and later was allowed to study at the university, in spite of his lack of education in the field of classical languages. He studied from 1862 to 1865, earning degrees in mathematics and physics. He was married to Anna Magdalena Smit and had three daughters and one son.
In 1866, he became director of a secondary school in
The Hague. In 1873, he obtained a doctorate degree under
Pieter Rijke for his thesis entitled "
Over de Continuïteit van den Gas- en Vloeistoftoestand" (On the continuity of the gas and liquid state). In 1876, he was appointed the first professor of physics at the
University of Amsterdam.
Van der Waals died in
Amsterdam in 1923, one year after his daughter's death.
See also
References
- ^ Van der Waals, Johannes, D. (1910). "The Equation of State for Gases and LiquidsPDF (588 KiB)." Nobel Lecture, Dec. 12.
Further reading
- Kipnis, Aleksandr Yakovlevich; Boris Efimovich Yavelov, and John Shipley Rowlinson (July 1996). Van der Waals and Molecular Science. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-855210-6.
