Peter Debye was one of the leading physical chemists of his time, whose studies in the field of molecular structure helped mankind in developing greater understanding of the subject.
Debye was a Dutch-American physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry. He was born on 24th March, 1884. He received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Munich in 1908.
In 1912, Peter Debye developed a method to discern how a molecule is arranged in a structure to determine how electrical charges are distributed. This became important in the mapping of molecular structures.
At the same time, X-ray radiation was becoming an important tool for mapping crystalline structures, but Peter Debye also developed methods for using both X-rays and electron beams to map molecular structures in gases, for example. Peter Debye was honoured with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1936. The world saw the last of this eminent scientist on 2nd November 1966, when he succumbed to a heart attack.