biography
| name: |
van der Waals, Johannes Diderik
|
pronunciation:
[van der wahls]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1837–1923)
|
| biography:
| Physicist, born in Leyden, W Netherlands. Largely self-taught, he studied at Leyden Universiy, and became professor at Amsterdam (1877–1908). He extended the classical ‘ideal’ gas laws (of Robert Boyle and Jacques Charles) to describe real gases, deriving the van der Waals equation of state (1873). This work led others to liquefy a range of common gases, and also provided new basic concepts for physical chemistry. He also investigated the weak attractive forces (van der Waals forces) between molecules. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1910. |
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