Gilles Holst Philips Fysics Laboratory in Eindhoven ! Or Nat Lab. In 1909 he became an assistant to Heike Kamerlingh Onnes at Leiden University. At Leiden, it is believed that he was the first to witness the phenomenon of superconductivity. The Gilles Holst Award was first awarded in 1939. He died in Holland at the age of 82. Gilles Holst Gilles Holst (20 March 1886 – 11 October 1968) was a Dutch physicist, known worldwide for his invention in 1932 of the low-pressure sodium lamp. His father was a manager of a shipyard. In 1904 he went to ETH Zurich to study
Condensed matter physics Thomas Andrews studied the phase transition from a liquid to a gas and coined the term critical point to describe the condition where a gas and a liquid were indistinguishable as phases, and Dutch physicist Johannes van der Waals supplied the theoretical framework which allowed the prediction of critical behavior based on measurements at much higher temperatures. By 1908, James Dewar and Heike Kamerlingh Onnes were successfully able to liquefy hydrogen and then newly discovered helium, respectively. Paul Drude in 1900 proposed the first theoretical model for a classical electron moving through a metallic solid. Drude's model described properties of