
Pieter Zeeman
(1865 - 1943)
Dutch physicist who shared with Hendrik A. Lorentz the Nobel Prize for
Physics in 1902 for his discovery of the Zeeman effect.
Zeeman, who had been a student of Lorentz at the University of Leiden,
began lecturing at Leiden in 1890. Six years later, at the suggestion
of Lorentz, he investigated the effect of magnetic fields on a source
of light and found that each of the lines in the spectrum of emitted
light split into several lines; this became known as the Zeeman effect.
Zeeman was appointed professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam
in 1900 and director of its Physical Institute in 1908. Remaining there
until his death, he conducted research on the propagation of light in
moving media such as water, quartz, and flint.
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