van der Waals is on the right, the apparatus is for the liquefaction of helium

Johannes Diderik van der Waals was first a secondary school teacher, before embarking on a Ph.D. in the Netherlands. His Ph.D. work led him to the eponymous van der Waals equation of state. As the Nobel web site notes:

"In 1873 he obtained his doctor's degree for a thesis entitled Over de Continiteit van den Gas - en Vloeistoftoestand (On the continuity of the gas and liquid state), which put him at once in the foremost rank of physicists. In this thesis he put forward an "Equation of State" embracing both the gaseous and the liquid state; he could demonstrate that these two states of aggregation not only merge into each other in a continuous manner, but that they are in fact of the same nature. The importance of this conclusion from Van der Waals' very first paper can be judged from the remarks made by James Clerk Maxwell in Nature, "that there can be no doubt that the name of Van der Waals will soon be among the foremost in molecular science" and "It has certainly directed the attention of more than one inquirer to the study of the Low-Dutch language in which it is written" (Maxwell probably meant to say "Low-German", which would also be incorrect, since Dutch is a language in its own right)."

See the Nobel site for more information.

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