Cornell Memorial Statement for Professor Peter Joseph William Debye (March 24, 1884 — October 2[sic], 1966)
"Peter J. W. Debye came to Cornell University in the fall of 1939 to present the Baker Lectures in Chemistry; he departed, to our great sorrow, in the fall of 1966, while still working on several exciting research problems, among the many which interested him during his active and rewarding scientific career. But a chronology of his sojourn in Ithaca is somewhat misleading. Through his reputation and influence as an explorer and expositor of physical phenomena, he may be said to have arrived in the early years of the second decade of this century, and he will remain as long as there is a single student of physics or chemistry on the Cornell campus.
To our nonscientific colleagues a listing of the numerous awards and honors which have been bestowed on Professor Debye by his scientific peers will convey some impression of the significance of his contributions. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1936. In addition, he received fourteen medals and citations, eighteen honorary degrees, and was elected to membership of twenty national academies.
After serving as departmental chairman at Gottingen, Leipzig, and other universities, he became Director of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin in 1934, and in the decade of the 1940’s he was Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at Cornell. Between 1952 and 1966, he was a Professor Emeritus, but a very active one.
In science, as in art, there is style. Debye’s theories, his ways of looking at physical phenomena and of expressing his understanding of them, were as uniquely Debye’s as a painting is unmistakably an El Greco or a van Gogh. The essential element of his style was simplicity, which for Debye was not merely a technique; it was an earnest conviction. He knew that physical phenomena must have simple explanations; he took complexity to be lack of understanding. If a theory was not yet simple then it was not yet right—it was unfinished and imperfect. To achieve
simplicity one must identify the essentials and isolate them from the irrelevancies. To recognize the essentials, to express them clearly and pictorially, and then to pursue their consequences with superb technical facility was Debye’s style.
...
For decades Professor P. J. W. Debye graciously received many visitors, among them scholars, students, and historians of science who came to pay their respects, to discuss, to learn, sometimes to dispute, but often simply to establish contact with a great intellect and to gain wisdom. To questions as to how he selected problems for investigation his reply was that he worked only on those problems which interested him and which he could solve; as to how he partitioned his time, he said that he devoted all his efforts to a single problem until it was resolved. He thoroughly enjoyed his scientific pursuits but balanced this with full appreciation of physical well-being. He stressed the importance of giving students enough time to think seriously about their assignments, and he frequently talked of the importance of generating and living in intellectually stimulating surroundings which could lead to scholarship and scientific discovery. He believed that the intense preoccupation of serious scientists with a problem generates an atmosphere which is pregnant with ideas, which goads the imagination of those who are immersed in it to the discovery of principles of the physical world.
With the departing of Debye the world has lost one of the few “total” scientists; total in his devotion to his task, total in the breadth of his interest; total in the mastery of his discipline, and total in his human simplicity and straightforwardness."
Note: The date of death on this statement is incorrect. Professor Debye died on November 2 1966