Jean Baptiste Perrin (1870-1942)

Awarded the Prize “for his work on the discontinuous structure of matter, especially for his discovery of sedimentation equilibrium.”

French physicist. Perrin was born in Lille, France on September 30, 1870. He was educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, where he received his doctorate in 1897. He was appointed to the Sorbonne where he was made professor of physical chemistry in 1910. He remained there until 1941. Perrin was the creator of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He was a member of the Royal Society in London was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1923. Perrin died in New York on April 17, 1942.