Pieter Zeeman Biography

Pieter Zeeman was a Dutch physicist who won Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the Zeeman Effect. He is one of the most well-known physicists who successfully conducted research on spectral lines that led to the discovery of what is known as Zeeman Effect. Zeeman grew up in a small village in an island in the Netherlands but that did not hinder his interest in the sciences from an early age and in fact he had submitted a scientific illustration for the phenomenon of Aurora Borealis to a magazine when he was still in school. Zeeman studied and taught at the University of Leiden and later on he went on to become a professor at the University of Amsterdam. He collaborated with another famous scientist of the time in Hendrik Lorentz right from the time he was a doctoral student and later on when he became a leading physicist. Zeeman’s success with the Zeeman Effect made him one of the biggest scientists in Europe and indeed the world in the late 19th and early 20th century but the true enormity of his findings have been understood many years after his death as his research formed the basis of a number of future research in the field.