On this date in 1837, Nobel Laureate Johannes Diderik van der Waals was born in Leiden, Netherlands. Most of van der Waals' career was focused on the study of thermodynamics, specifically for gases and liquids. In his doctoral thesis, he derived the equation of state that shows describes gases and fluids under a specific pressure, volume, and temperature. That work, which now bears his name, earned him the 1910 Nobel Prize in Physics. The thesis was also the first postulation of an inter-molecular force.
