Peter Debye
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Petrus (Peter) Josephus Wilhelmus Debye
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1936
Born: 24 March 1884, Maastricht, the Netherlands
Died: 2 November 1966, Ithaca, NY, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Berlin University, Berlin, Germany; Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut (now Max-Planck-Institut) für Physik, Berlin, Germany
Prize motivation: “for his contributions to our knowledge of molecular structure through his investigations on dipole moments and on the diffraction of X-rays and electrons in gases”
Prize share: 1/1
Work
One of chemistry’s most important missions is to discern what molecules look like—how molecules are arranged in a structure. A method Peter Debye developed in 1912 to determine how electrical charges are distributed in a molecule became important in the mapping of molecular structures. At the same time, X-ray radiation was becoming an important tool for mapping crystalline structures, but Debye also developed methods for using both X-rays and electron beams to map molecular structures in gases, for example.
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