Johannes Diderik van der Waals
Johannes van der Waals | |
---|---|
Johannes Diderik van der Waals | |
Born |
November 23 1837 |
Died | March 8 1923 (aged 85) |
Residence | Netherlands |
Nationality | Dutch |
Field | Physicist |
Institutions | University of Amsterdam |
Alma mater | University of Leiden |
Academic advisor | Pieter Rijke |
Notable students | Diederik Korteweg |
Known for | van der Waals equation of state |
Notable prizes | Nobel Prize for Physics (1910) |
He is notably the father of the poet Jacqueline Elisabeth and the physicist Johannes Diderik Jr. |
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 which describe the relation between the pressure, volume, and temperature of fluids (gases and liquids).
Biography
Johannes Diderik van der Waals was born in the Dutch city of Leiden. He was the son of a carpenter, and as a result, was unable to attend secondary school, but completed an extended elementary school education. He was able to obtain teaching licenses by studying on his own and passing standard tests. In 1864, he obtained a position at a high school in Deventer, teaching mathematics and physics. The following year, he was married to Anna Magdalena Smit. In 1866 van der Waals removed to the Hague, where he taught at a high school, eventually becoming its principal. He continued to study advanced mathematics and physics at the University of Leiden, but because of his lack of a formal secondary school education, had to obtain an exemption in order to proceed with a doctoral program. He obtained his doctorate in 1873 based on a dissertation that quickly caught the attention of the international scientific community. His thesis was entitled Over de Continuïteit van den Gas- en Vloeistoftoestand (On the continuity of the gas and liquid state). In this thesis he derived the equation of state bearing his name. The importance of this work is that it gave a model in which the liquid and the gas phase of a substance merge into each other in a continuous manner. It shows that the two phases are in fact of the same nature. In deriving his equation of state van der Waals assumed not only the existence of molecules (which in physics was disputed at the time), but also that they are of finite size and attract each other. Since he was one of the first to postulate an intermolecular force, however rudimentary, such a force is now sometimes called a van der Waals force.
One of the conclusions that could be drawn from van der Waals's research was that there reaches a critical temperature for a gas above which it is impossible to condense the gas into a liquid.
Van der Waals found his incentive for his life's work after reading the 1857 treatise by Rudolf Clausius entitled Über die Art der Bewegung welche wir Wärme nennen (On the Kind of Motion which we Call Heat).[1], along with other papers and books by Clausius. Van der Waals was later greatly influenced by the writings of James Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann, and Willard Gibbs, who were all working on similar problems in the kinetic theory of gases.
It did not take long for the scientific community to latch onto the new results. Maxwell, who had already developed his own theory on the motion of molecules in a gas, praised van der Waals for his work. "This at once puts his name among the foremost in science," Maxwell said in Nature magazine a year after van der Waals's work was published.
Accolades quickly followed. In 1875, he was admitted as a member to the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1877, he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam. Soon afterward, he was able to establish an estimate for the mass of a hydrogen atom.
A second great discovery of van der Waals was published in 1880: The Law of Corresponding States. This law shows, that after scaling temperature, pressure, and volume by their respective critical values, a general form of the equation of state is obtained which is applicable to all substances. This law served as a guide during the experiments that led to the liquefaction of helium by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes.
For his work he won the 1910 Nobel Prize in physics.
Family
- spouse: Anna Magdalena Smit (m. 1864)
- children: Anne Madeleine, Jacqueline Elisabeth (poet), Johanna Diderica, Johannes Diderik Jr. (physicist)
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 in Leiden under Pieter Rijke. In 1876, he was appointed the first professor of physics at the newly established University of Amsterdam.
Van der Waals died in Amsterdam in 1923, one year after his daughter's death.
See also
- Van der Waals equation
- Van der Waals forces
- Van der Waals radius
Notes
- ↑ Van der Waals, Johannes, D. 1910. The Equation of State for Gases and Liquids. Nobel Lecture. Retrieved December 7, 2007.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Kipnis, Aleksandr Yakovlevich and Boris Efimovich Yavelov, and John Shipley Rowlinson. 1996. Van der Waals and Molecular Science. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-855210-6.
- Sengers, Johanna Levelt. 2003. How Fluids Unmix: Discoveries by the School of Van der Waals and Kamerlingh Onnes. Amsterdam, NL: Koninklijke Nerlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen. ISBN 9069843579.
- Parsegian, V. Adrian. 2006. Van der Waals Forces: A Handbook for Biologists, Chemists, Engineers, and Physicists. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521839068.
External links
- Scientists of the Dutch School Van der Waals, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved December 8, 2007.
- Albert van Helden Johannes Diderik van der Waals 1837 – 1923 In: K. van Berkel, A. van Helden and L. Palm ed., A history of Science in the Netherlands. Survey, Themes and Reference (Leiden: Brill, 1999) 596 - 598. Retrieved December 8, 2007.
- Johannes Diderik van der Waals. Biography at Nobelprize.org. Retrieved December 8, 2007.
- Biography of Johannes Diderik van der Waals (1837 – 1923) at the National library of the Netherlands. Retrieved December 8, 2007.
|
Persondata | |
---|---|
NAME | Waals, Johannes van der |
ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
SHORT DESCRIPTION | Physicist |
DATE OF BIRTH | November 23, 1837 |
PLACE OF BIRTH | Leiden, Netherlands |
DATE OF DEATH | Diederik Korteweg |
PLACE OF DEATH | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
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