Frits Zernike

He married Theodora ‘Dora’ Wilhelmina van Bommel van Vloten, a divorced teacher, on January 28, 1930 and had a son named Frits from this marriage. He also adopted Dora’s daughter N. N. Zernike.

He married Lena Korberg-Baanders, the widow of Samuel ‘Sam’ Kopenberg, on February 12, 1954, after the death of Dora on February 16, 1945.

He fell ill in 1958 and did not recover from it until his death in 1966.

Frits Zernike was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on July 16, 1888. His father, Carl Frederick August Zernike was the headmaster of an elementary school while his mother, Antje Diepernik was a mathematics teacher.

He was one of the six children in the family. He had four younger sisters named Anna, Lize, Elisabeth and Nelly and a younger brother named Johannes.

He had a passion for physics that he had inherited from his father and possessed items such a test tubes, crucibles and pots that were required for carrying out experiments during his schooldays. At school Frits excelled in science subjects but neglected subjects such as history and languages.

He had set up a mini observatory at his home from where he used to take photographs of comets. He also got involved in photographic experiments and used to make synthetic ether for his experiments. Sometimes he helped his parents in solving complicated mathematical problems as well.

After graduating from high school he joined the ‘University of Amsterdam’ in 1905 and studied chemistry as a major subject and physics and mathematics as minor subjects.

Frits Zernike joined the ‘Groningen University’ as a lecturer of ‘Mathematical Physics’ and taught there from 1915 to 1920.

He became a professor of ‘Theoretical Physics’ at the ‘Groningen University’ in 1920.

From 1930 he started studying optics more extensively. He developed the phase-contrast theory during this time and wrote on imaging errors produced by concave gratings.

He described his findings to the ‘Physical and Medical Congress’ held at Wageningen in 1933.

Zerniker’s next contribution to the field of optics was the ‘orthogonal circle polynomials’ which solved a long-standing problem related to the ‘optimum balancing’ of different kinds of aberrations that are produced in an optical instrument. These ‘circle polynomials’ started being used in image analysis and optical metrology and design from the 1960s.

Frits Zernike was made a member of the ‘Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences’ in 1946.

He received the ‘Rumford Medal’ from the ‘Royal Society of London’ in 1952.

He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1953.

He received an honorary doctorate in Medicine from the ‘University of Amsterdam’.

He was made a ‘Foreign Member’ of the ‘Optical Society of America’ and a member of the ‘Royal Microscopical Society’.