Pieter Rijke

Petrus Leonardus Rijke, known as Pieter Rijke (1812 to 1899), was a Dutch physicist and professor of experimental physics at Leiden University, born in Hemmen as the son of a pastor. He studied physics at Leiden under Pieter Johannes Uijlenbroek and took his doctorate there in 1836 with a thesis on the origin of voltaic electricity. In 1835 he was appointed professor of physics at the Royal Athenaeum in Maastricht, became an extraordinary professor at Leiden in 1845 and a full professor in 1854, where he started a physics laboratory with a large collection of instruments. His career was spent exploring the physics of electricity, and he is known for the Rijke tube. His most notable students were Hendrik Lorentz and Johannes van der Waals, and he was succeeded in 1882 by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes.