Paul Scherrer was born in St. Gallen. In 1908, he enrolled at Swiss Federal Polytechnic (later known as ETH Zurich), changing course from Botany to Mathematics and Physics after two semesters. In 1912, Scherrer spent one semester at Königsberg University, then undertook further studies at the University of Göttingen, graduating from there with a doctorate on the Faraday Effect in the hydrogen molecule. In 1916, while still working on his dissertation, he and his tutor, Peter Debye, developed the “Debye–Scherrer powder method”, a procedure using X-rays for the structural analysis of crystals. This made an important contribution to the development of the scattering techniques that are still used in the large facilities at the Paul Scherrer Institute to this day. Debye received the Nobel Prize for chemistry for this work in 1936.