Pieter Maarten de Wolff

Pieter Maarten de Wolff (23 July 1919 – 10 April 1998), or Pim de Wolff was a Dutch physicist, crystallographer, and professor at Delft University of Technology. He was one of the founders of N-dimensional crystallography together with Ted Janssen and Aloysio Janner.

Education and career

De Wolff was born in the Dutch East Indies as the youngest of their four children. His father is Maarten de Wolff, a civil engineering engineer, and Hermine Elizabeth van Vliet is his mother. Starting from 1929, the family lived in Medan on Sumatra, where he also went to school. In 1932, they returned to the Netherlands and he went to the Hogere Burgerschool in The Hague. After obtaining his diploma, de Wolff studied physics at the Delft University of Technology in 1936, where he was first introduced to X-ray powder diffraction during his graduation research. He obtained his engineering degree in 1941, just before the German occupiers closed the college in Delft. Although further study was not possible, de Wolff, through the intercession of Henk Dorgelo, was able to work at the Technical Physics Department of the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research. In 1951, de Wolff obtained his PhD from Henk Dorgelo with the thesis entitled Contributions to the theory and practice of quantitative determinations by the X-ray powder diffraction method.

In 1958, de Wolff was appointed professor of theoretical and applied physics at the Delft University of Technology, a position he held until his retirement in 1984. In addition to his scientific work, De Wolff spent part of his time on administrative tasks, including chairman of the Applied Physics Department (1971–1973) and of the Physics Practicum department (1974–1980). He also chaired the Committee on the Nomenclature of Symmetry at the International Union of Crystallography.

Honors and awards

De Wolff received a number of important awards for his work, such as the Gilles Holst Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences for the Guinier–de Wolff Camera in 1976, the Abraham Gottlob Werner Medal of the German Mineralogical Society in 1986, a distinguished fellowship award from the International Center for Diffraction Data in 1994. He received the Gregori Aminoff Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1998. Unfortunately, he was already too ill to go to Stockholm to receive the medal from the Swedish king. He died just ten days later.