Peter Joseph William Debye was a Dutch-American physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry. Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debye was born March 24, 1884, at Maastricht, the Netherlands. In 1906, Sommerfeld received an appointment at Munich, Bavaria, and took Debye with him as his assistant. Debye got his Ph.D. with a dissertation on radiation pressure in 1908. In 1910, he derived the Planck radiation formula using a method which Max Planck agreed was simpler than his own. From 1934 to 1939 Debye was director of the physics section of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. From 1936 onwards he was also professor of Theoretical Physics at the Frederick William University of Berlin. These positions were held during the years that Adolf Hitler ruled Nazi Germany and, from 1938 onward, Austria. In 1965, he received the National Medal Of Science. He died on November 2, 1966 in  Ithaca, New York, United States.