Frits Zernike
Frits Zernike was born in Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands on July 16th, 1888 and is the Physicist. At the age of 77, Frits Zernike biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
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Early life and education
Frits Zernike was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on July 16th, 1888, to Carl Friedrich August Zernike and Antje Dieperink. Both parents were math teachers, and he recalled his father's love for physics. At the University of Amsterdam, he studied chemistry (his major), mathematics, and physics.
Academic career
In 1912, he was awarded a prize for his work on opalescence in gases. In 1913, he became assistant to Jacobus Kapteyn at the astronomical laboratory of Groningen University. In 1914, Zernike and Leonard Ornstein were jointly responsible for the derivation of the Ornstein–Zernike equation in critical-point theory. In 1915, he became lector in theoretical mechanics and mathematical physics at the same university and in 1920 he was promoted to professor of mathematical physics.
In 1930, Zernike was conducting research into spectral lines when he discovered that the so-called ghost lines that occur to the left and right of each primary line in spectra created by means of a diffraction grating, have their phase shifted from that of the primary line by 90 degrees. It was at a Physical and Medical Congress in Wageningen in 1933, that Zernike first described his phase contrast technique in microscopy. He extended his method to test the figure of concave mirrors. His discovery lay at the base of the first phase contrast microscope, built during World War II.
He also made another contribution in the field of optics, relating to the efficient description of the imaging defects or aberrations of optical imaging systems like microscopes and telescopes. The representation of aberrations was originally based on the theory developed by Ludwig Seidel in the middle of the nineteenth century. Seidel's representation was based on power series expansions and did not allow a clear separation between various types and orders of aberrations. Zernike's orthogonal circle polynomials provided a solution to the long-standing problem of the optimum 'balancing' of the various aberrations of an optical instrument. Since the 1960s, Zernike's circle polynomials are widely used in optical design, optical metrology and image analysis.
Zernike's work helped awaken interest in coherence theory, the study of partially coherent light sources. In 1938 he published a simpler derivation of Van Cittert's 1934 theorem on the coherence of radiation from distant sources, now known as the Van Cittert–Zernike theorem.