Peter Debye Facts
Peter Debye Facts
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| Interesting Peter Debye Facts: |
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| Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debije was born in Maastricht, Netherlands. |
| In 1901 he entered the Aachen University of Technology, in Prussia where he studied mathematics and classical physics. |
| In 1905 he earned a degree in electrical engineering. |
| His first scientific paper was published in 1907 and was a solution to a problem of eddy currents. |
| In 1906 his mentor, Arnold Sommerfeld, was appointed to Munich and he took Debye as his assistant. |
| In 1908 Debye earned his PhD with a dissertation on radiation pressure. |
| In 1910 he published the Planck radiation formula using a simpler method that Planck agreed was simpler and many of his important contributions to the field of physics were improvements or extensions of theories in physics. |
| In 1911 he took the professorship at the University of Zurich that Albert Einstein had vacated when he was appointed to Prague. |
| In 1912 he added to Albert Einstein's theory of specific heat by including phonons which lowered temperatures. |
| In 1913 he improved on Niels Bohr's theory of atomic structure by introducing elliptical orbits. |
| In 1914 he collaborated with Paul Scherrer and calculated the effect of temperature on X-ray diffraction patterns in crystalline solids. |
| Between 1936 and 1939 he was the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. |
| In 1939 he lectured at Cornell University and from 1940 to 1952 was a professor and head of the chemistry department there. |
| His work at Cornell was on the use of light-scattering techniques on polymer molecules. |
| Among his many honors are the Lorentz Medal (1935), the Franklin Medal (1937), the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1936), the Priestley Medal (1963) and the National Medal of Science (1965). |
| In 1946 he became an American citizen. |
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