Peter Joseph William Debye:
Peter Debye was a Dutch American physical chemist and Nobel laureate.
Birth:
March 24, 1884 in Maastricht, Netherlands
Death:
November 2, 1966 in Ithaca, New York
Claim to Fame:
Debye was a Dutch-American physical chemist who was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his investigations of the dipole moments and electron spacing of atoms in gases and his improvements in x-ray crystallography. His study of electron spacing greatly increased the understanding of how atoms arrange themselves and their spacing within molecules. He also refined x-ray crystallography by discovering a technique that did not require the growing of a large pure crystal and a powdered form would be sufficient.
