| | J. D. van der Waals - Biography (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22) |
 | | Johannes Diderik van der Waals was born on November 23, 1837 in Leyden, The Netherlands, the son of Jacobus van der Waals and Elisabeth van den Burg. |
 | | The immediate cause of Van der Waals' interest in the subject of his thesis was R. Clausius' treatise considering heat as a phenomenon of motion, which led him to look for an explanation for T. Andrews' experiments (1869) revealing the existence of "critical temperatures " in gases. |
 | | It was Van der Waals' genius that made him see the necessity of taking into account the volumes of molecules and the intermolecular forces ("Van der Waals forces", as they are now generally called) in establishing the relationship between the pressure, volume and temperature of gases and liquids. |
| www.nobel.se /physics/laureates/1910/waals-bio.html (916 words) |