Johannes Diderik van der Waals
John Diderik van der Waals ( born November 23, 1837 in Leiden, † March 8, 1923 in Amsterdam) was a Dutch physicist. In 1910 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.
Life
After his education, he worked as a teacher in his native city of Leiden. Without a high school as an access authorization to a university degree to have, visited van der Waals in the period 1862-1865 at Leiden University lectures and seminars. This he obtained an extension of his teaching certificates in mathematics and physics. From 1864 he worked as a teacher in Deventer. 1866 took over the van der Waals one place at a secondary school in The Hague, where he also later became headmaster. A change in the law made it possible that he could carry out a study of the natural sciences without the Abitur. Van der Waals completed his studies in 1873 with a thesis in physics. As a professor of physics from 1877 to 1908 he was working at the University of Amsterdam.
Services
Van der Waals explored, among others, the behavior of molecules and dealt with theories about the state of matter. In 1869 he discovered the cause of the attractive forces between atoms or nonpolar molecules - which were later named after him Van -der- Waals forces. 1873 developed van der Waals part of his PhD thesis at the University of Leiden, a model of the continuity of the gaseous and liquid states of matter. From this he proposed an equation of state, which showed that physical states for gases and liquids not only merge into one another, but that these aggregate states based on the same basic physical principles.
For this achievement, van der Waals received the 1910 Nobel Prize in Physics " for his work on the equation of state of gases and liquids," which led especially to those emanating from him Van der Waals equation.
Works
- JD van der Waals: Over de Continuïteit van den Gas -en Vloeistoftoestand ( The continuity of the liquid and gaseous state ). Leiden University, 1873 (Dissertation)
- JD van der Waals, P. Kohnstamm: Textbook of Thermodynamics: Part 1 Johann Ambrosius Barth - Verlag, 1908.
- JD van der Waals, P. Kohnstamm: Textbook of Thermodynamics: Part 2, Johann Ambrosius Barth Verlag, , 1912.