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Born Zonnemaire, the Netherlands, 25 May 1865
Died Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 9 October 1943
Dutch physicist Pieter Zeeman made the laboratory discovery of the effect bearing his name, in which spectral lines emitted or absorbed by atoms in magnetic fields are slightly shifted in wavelength and polarized. He shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Hendrik Lorentz who had immediately provided a theoretical explanation of the observation for “their researches into the influence of magnetism upon radiation phenomena.”
Zeeman was educated at the University of Leiden in the laboratory directed by Keike Kamerlingh Onnes (Nobel Prize 1913 for his discovery of liquid helium), receiving his Ph.D. in 1893. He remained for several years as a Privatdozentand lecturer, before being appointed to a professorship at the University of Amsterdam and, in 1908, also as director of the Physical...
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Selected References
Kox, A. J. (1997). “The Discovery of the Electron: II. The Zeeman Effect.” European Journal of Physics 18: 139–144.
Zeeman, P. (1913). Researches in Magneto‐Optics. London: Macmillan.
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Kox, A.J. (2007). Zeeman, Pieter. In: Hockey, T., et al. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_1523
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