Frits Zernike
Frederik " Frits " Zernike (* July 16, 1888 in Amsterdam, † March 10, 1966 in Naarden ) was a Dutch physicist and Nobel laureate.
Life
Frits Zernike was born as the second of six children of a teacher couple Carl Frederick August Zernike and Antje Dieperink. He had inherited an interest in the physical and natural sciences from his father, because he neglected the non- science subjects in school, he later had a matriculation test in Greek and Latin exist for university admission. He began in 1905 at the University of Amsterdam to study chemistry with minors in mathematics and physics. In 1913 he became assistant to Jacobus C. Kapteyn at Groningen University and received his doctorate in 1915 on the critical opalescence. Subsequently, he taught as a professor of mathematical physics in Groningen in 1920 and received a professorship. Zernike was married twice. After the death of his first wife Dora van Bommel van Vloten († 1944), with whom he had a son who he married in 1954 L. Koperberg - Baanders. Some siblings Zernike achieved greater prominence: a brother Zernike was also a professor of physics, his sister Anne Zernike was married to the painter Jan Mankes and was ordained as a Mennonite theologian was the first woman in the Netherlands as a pastor, his sister Elisabeth Zernike was a well known literary figure of the Netherlands.
Work
Zernike developed a sensitive galvanometer, which was produced in Delft from 1923 by Kipp and Sons. From 1930 on, he worked on the optics and developed in the same year a phase contrast microscope, the importance of which was, however, completely underestimated by the Zeiss works. Only after the German Wehrmacht in 1941 carried out an inventory of all potentially militarily interesting inventions, the first microscopes were actually made . Thus, the grotesque situation that the Wehrmacht a long underrated invention Zernike's industrial breakthrough helped while Zernike and his compatriots from the oppression suffered by the same forces during the occupation of the Netherlands was born. After the war, thousands of phase contrast microscopes were produced by several manufacturers, which proved in many areas of science, particularly medicine, very useful.
Zernike was awarded the 1953 Nobel Prize in Physics " for the phase contrast method specified by him, especially for his invention of the phase contrast microscope ."
Zernike supplied with the Zernike polynomials named after him, on the unit circle orthogonal functions, also another important contribution to the optics, which are used for example to describe figure errors.
Awards
- Rumford Medal, Royal Society
- Nobel Prize in Physics, 1953