Pierre Duhem

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    Duhem's Life

    Pierre was a French philosopher of science among other things.
  • Eventful Childhood

    At the young age of only seven Pierre was given private lessons to expand his knowledge. His parents were the ones who set this in motion, wanting him to study and thus making him a literate writer by the age nine! But in 1972 at the age of 10 his younger sister passed away due to a diphtheria epidemic.
  • Education

    Pierre enrolled at the institution of higher education, the Ecole Normale Supérieure in France. He was one of the top 30 students to be chosen to study there out of the 800 applicants! In fact he was number one! He was offered a job in Louis Pasteur’s laboratory as a chemist-bacteriologist, but denied the job because he only desired to work with theoretical physics.
  • Thermodynamic Potential

    This was Pierre's first notable thesis he wrote as a third year student in college. When he presented it to a board of scholars he was rejected, but the following year someone else had presented the same thesis. Duhem though never quit and kept moving forward with different thesis'.
  • Duhem's Teachings

    Pierre contributed a lot to thermodynamics. Such as the Duhem–Margules and Gibbs–Duhem equations. They deal with reversible processes in thermodynamics and give a general proof of the Gibbs phase rule. He was a very well known and published physicist.
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