Johannes Diderik Van der Waals

Johannes Diderik Van der Waals (1837-1923), Dutch physicist and Nobel laureate. He was born in Leiden and educated at Leiden University. From 1877 to 1907 he was professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam. Van der Waals was interested primarily in thermodynamics; he developed a theory of corresponding states on the continuity of the liquid and gaseous states of matter expressed in the van der Waals equation. For these discoveries he was awarded the 1910 Nobel Prize in physics. He also studied the attractive forces holding the atoms of molecules together. These are called van der Waals forces, in his honor.