KNAW > Van der Waals > Scientists

portret Van der Waals Johannes Diderik Van der Waals (1837-1923) was born in Leiden, the oldest of the ten children of a carpenter. As a child from the working class, he finished his public schooling at the age of fifteen, after completion of three years of advanced primary education. He became a teacher’s apprentice in an elementary school. At the age of nineteen, while teaching, he began to take courses and examinations that would improve his qualifications as a teacher. In 1862, he began to attend lectures at the University of Leiden. For those not qualified to be enrolled as regular students for lack of the proper college-preparatory schooling, the University had a provision to take up to four courses a year. Van der Waals studied first mathematics, then astronomy, and finally physics with Professor Rijke, who would be thesis advisor to both Van der Waals and Lorentz. When the new HBS was founded and teacher qualifications were specified in 1864, Van der Waals, while a director of an elementary school, spent two strenuous years to study for the required examinations in mathematics and physics. In 1865, he was appointed a physics teacher at the HBS in Deventer in the east of the Netherlands, and in 1866, he received such a position in The Hague and resumed his coursework at the University of Leiden. After receiving a dispensation from the study of classical languages, he brilliantly passed the exams in physics and mathematics qualifying for doctoral studies. At Leiden University, on June 14, 1873, he defended his doctoral thesis “Over de Continuiteit van den Gas en Vloeistoftoestand” (on the continuity of the gaseous and liquid state). In the thesis, he introduced the concepts of molecular volume and molecular attraction (presently known as the Van der Waals force), and described the behavior of condensing gases and criticality by means of the famous Van der Waals equation.

After Maxwell’s qualified endorsement of his thesis in Nature in 1874, Van der Waals’s reputation was established. In 1877 the forty-years-old high-school teacher was appointed as the first and only professor of physics at the newly founded University of Amsterdam. In 1880, he published his work on the law of corresponding states. A decade passed before Van der Waals (1890) published another major piece of work, his theory of mixtures. The reason for the long delay was that Van der Waals’s young wife, the mother of his four children, succumbed to tuberculosis in 1881. For Van der Waals, life had lost all taste, and it took him many years to overcome his deep depression. In the late 1880s, Kamerlingh Onnes’s plan to study fluid mixtures in his new laboratory motivated Van der Waals to publish his paper phase separation of fluid mixtures in 1890. The Amsterdam mathematician Diederik Korteweg had laid the mathematical foundation for this work. From then on, fluid mixture behavior was Van der Waals’s principal occupation until late in life.

With utter dedication, Van der Waals served the University until his retirement in 1908. Notwithstanding a crushing teaching load, he produced an enormous oeuvre, including his major papers on corresponding states, fluid mixtures, and capillarity. Van der Waals was elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in 1875, and to the Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (HMW) in 1878. He served as the General Secretary of KNAW from 1896 to 1912. In 1910, he received the Nobel Prize in physics for his studies of the physical state of liquids and gases.

Biographical references:

Biography of Johannes Diderik van der Waals link to the ‘Nobel Prize’ site
Levensbericht (pdf 102 Kb)
F.A.F.C. Went, Johannes Diderik van der Waals, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Verslagen Natuurkunde 32-I (1923), pp. 213-217.
Nobel Lecture (pdf 68 Kb)
J.D. van der Waals, The equation of state for gases and liquids, Nobel lecture (1910).
A. Ya. Kipnis, B.E. Yavelov, and J.S. Rowlinson, Van der Waals and Molecular Science, Clarendon Press, Oxford (1996).

References to selected publications by Van der Waals's work

J.S. Rowlinson, J.D. van der Waals, On the Continuity of the Gaseous and the Liquid States, Studies in Statistical Mechanics XIV. J.L. Lebowitz , Ed., North Holland, Amsterdam (1988).
This book contains an English translation of Van der Waals's doctoral thesis and of his article on phase separation of fluid mixtures.

References to highly significant work

On molecular forces, the Van der Waals equation, the vapor-liquid phase transition and the critical point:

J.D. van der Waals, Over de Continuiteit van den Gas- en Vloeistoftoestand [On the Continuity of the Gaseous and Liquid States], doctoral thesis, Leiden, A,W, Sijthoff (1873).
J.D. van der Waals, Die Continuität des Gasförmigen und Flüssigen Zustandes, aus dem Holländischen Ubersetzt und mit Zusätzen versehen von Dr. Friedrich Roth, [The Continuity of the Gaseous and Liquid States, translated from the Dutch and provided with additions by Dr. Friedrich Roth], Leipzig, Barth (1881). A two-volume second edition, of 1899-1900, includes Van der Waals’s theory of binary mixtures. For an English translation, see Rowlinson (1988).

On the law of corresponding states:

J.D. van der Waals, Onderzoekingen omtrent de overeenstemmende eigenschappen der normale verzadigden-damp – en vloeistoflijnen voor de verschillende stoffen en omtrent een wijziging in den vorm dier lijnen bij mengsels [Investigations on the corresponding properties of the normal saturated vapor and liquid curves for different fluids, and about a modification in the form of these curves for mixtures], Verhandelingen Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen 20, No. 5 (1880a) 1-32, incl. Naschrift (postscript). See also the German version of his thesis, Van der Waals (1881), Ch. 12, and Rowlinson’s 1988 English translation.
J.D. van der Waals, Over de coëfficiënten van uitzetting en van samendrukking in overeenstemmende toestanden der verschillende vloeistoffen [On the coefficients of expansion and compression in corresponding states of different liquids], Verhandelingen Koninklijke Akademie van wetenschappen 20 No. 6 (1880) 1-11. See also the German version of his thesis (1881), Ch. 13, and Rowlinson’s 1988 English translation.

On the theory of binary fluid mixtures:

J.D. van der Waals, Molekulartheorie eines Körpers, der aus zwei verschiedenen Stoffen besteht [Molecular theory of a substance composed of two different species], Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie 5 (1890) 133-173.
J.D. van der Waals, Théorie moléculaire d’une substance composée de deux matières différentes [Molecular theory of a substance composed of two different species], Archives Néerlandaises des Sciences Exactes et Naturelles. Société Hollandaise des Sciences 24 (1891) 1-56. English translation: see Rowlinson (1988).

Capillarity:

J.D. van der Waals, Thermodynamische Theorie der Kapillarität unter Voraussetzung Stetiger Dichteänderung [The thermodynamic theory of capillarity under the hypothesis of a continuous variation of density], Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie 13 (1894) 657-725. English translation: see Rowlinson (1979).

English translations of articles by Van der Waals:

J.S. Rowlinson, Translation of J.D. Van der Waals, The thermodynamic theory of capillarity under the hypothesis of a continuous variation of density, Journal of Statistical Physics 20 (1979) 200-244.
J.S. Rowlinson, J.D. van der Waals, On the Continuity of the Gaseous and Liquid States, Studies in Statistical Mechanics XIV. J.L. Lebowitz , Ed., North Holland, Amsterdam (1988).