Gilles Holst

Gilles Holst (20 March 1886 – 11 October 1968)[1] was a Dutch physicist, known worldwide for his invention in 1932 of the low-pressure sodium lamp.

Gilles Holst (left), P. Teding van Berkhout and Balthasar van der Pol in 1925

Early life

His father was a manager of a shipyard. In 1904 he went to ETH Zurich to study mechanical engineering, changing after a year to mathematics and physics.

Career

He worked with Balthasar van der Pol, known for the Van der Pol oscillator, and Frans Michel Penning, known for Penning ionization and the Penning mixture. In 1908 he became a geprüfter Fachlehrer, or qualified teacher. And most important, he became the science director of the Philips Physics Laboratory in Eindhoven.

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.

Personal life

He died in Holland at the age of 82.

gollark: You could just have a "thing type" field in them but then you're just doing tagged unions in an indirect way.
gollark: If you want, say, a list of AType values and BType ones, TS has *un*tagged union types for that, but you then have to do stupid stuff to discriminate between them.
gollark: Oh, it's nice for abstract syntax trees too, not that that comes up in frontend development much.
gollark: That doesn't sound very nicely typeable.
gollark: If you want to have something be, I don't know, either a PendingOrder with one set of properties or a FulfilledOrder with another, tagged unions can express that neatly.

References
  1. Biography Portal of the Netherlands
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