Paul H. E. Meijer
Paul Herman Ernst Meijer, 95, Professor Emeritus of Physics at The Catholic University of America, died on 9 July 2017, in Washington, DC, from complications from a stroke.
Paul Meijer was born on 14 November 1921 in The Hague, the Netherlands, and studied engineering at the Technical University of Delft. In 1943, when students were ordered to sign a loyalty oath to the German Occupation Forces, Meijer was among those who bravely refused. He had to leave the university and go into hiding to avoid being sent into forced labor in Germany. Meijer was in hiding, struggling to find food and to avoid arrest, for much of the rest of the war. After the war, he continued his education and received a Ph. D. from Leiden University in 1951 under the supervision of H. A. Kramers, for a dissertation entitled “The Sextet Ground-Level in Diluted Iron-Alum.” At Leiden he met Marianne Schwarz, a Dutch Jew who had survived the Holocaust in Switzerland and who became his wife in 1949.
Meijer came to the United States in 1953 under a Fulbright grant at The Case Institute of Technology. He taught at Duke University and at the University of Delaware before joining the faculty of Catholic University in 1956. He became a U.S. citizen in 1959.
Meijer taught at Catholic University from 1956 until his retirement in 1992, chairing the Physics Department from 1980-1983. He was a part-time employee at the National Bureau of Standards (later the National Institute of Standards and Technology) from 1960 to 1986. He held visiting appointments at the universities of Paris and Nancy in France, as well as at Erciyes University in Kayseri, Turkey. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Grant in 1965 at the École Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles de Paris, as well as of several Fulbright grants. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Early in his career, Meijer worked on group theory in quantum mechanics and solid state physics. In 1962, he wrote with Edmond Bauer the book Group Theory. The Application to Quantum Mechanics; this book was reprinted by Dover Publications in 2004. He edited the book Quantum Statistical Mechanics, published in 1966. His thesis work, published in 1951, had resolved a discrepancy between specific heat and paramagnetic resonance data for iron ammonium alum by introducing an additional field of trigonal symmetry. He extended this work to other crystals, such as Cr-K-alum. He developed the projection operator technique for crystal field splittings and paramagnetic spectra in 1954. In 1960, he published a group theoretical proof of Kramers’ theorem for the degeneracy of the energy levels of an ion in a crystal field.
Later he began to work in the statistical mechanics of solids and liquids. In 1954, he and Martin J. Klein provided a statistical mechanical proof of Ilya Prigogine’s minimum entropy theorem characterizing the steady-state of an irreversible process. In 1956, Meijer extended this approach to particles that obey Fermi-Dirac or Bose-Einstein statistics and to systems in which the total number of particles is variable. In the 1960s and 1970s, Meijer and R. A. Farrell published a series of papers on phase transitions and critical exponents in Ising and other models, applying Padé approximants and cluster expansion methods. In 1979, they determined critical exponents from power series, including the influence of further neighbors. Over the same period, Meijer published several papers on the ground states of crystals with dipole-dipole and exchange interactions. In 1980, he applied mode-coupling theory to a possible anomalous behavior of the transport properties of supercooled liquids.
His interests were very broad and he also published papers on relaxation phenomena near critical points, phase transformations and nucleation in emulsions, critical magnetic fields in superconducting SnTe, liquid 4He, metamagnets, band structure, lattice gases, global phase diagrams, and critical lines. In 1974, with G. P. Newton and J. G. C. Walker, he published a study of the energy levels of molecular nitrogen for conditions in the thermosphere corresponding to stable auroral red arcs. In 1995, with R. D. Mountain and S. C. Johnson, he published an interaction model that accounts for phase transitions in crystalline C60.
With Antonius Levelt, Meijer pioneered the use of computer algebra to verify van Laar’s phase diagram calculations of the early 1900s. He coined the term “van Laar Point” in the theory of global binary phase diagrams of fluid mixtures. He co-wrote The Physics of Phase Transitions: Concepts and Applications with Pierre Papon and Jacques Leblond (second edition in 2006). Altogether he wrote some 150 papers in physics, mathematics, and engineering.
During his career he guided numerous students through their PhD and MS dissertations and stimulated many more through seminars and discussions. He was the soul of a group of Washington area physicists and chemists who met in the evenings to talk about statistical physics. Meijer was known by students and colleagues alike for his jovial, friendly, and energetic nature and for his boundless enthusiasm for his research. Students in his classes enjoyed not only his intimate knowledge of the subject matter, but also his entertaining (and often irreverent) personal anecdotes of his encounters with many of the giants of twentieth century physics. He was typically turned out in a pristine white dress shirt and a red tie, and he was always ready with a joke.
Meijer was known throughout Washington, DC, for his unflagging advocacy of bicycling. He worked to establish the Metropolitan Branch bike trail between Silver Spring, MD, and Union Station in DC. On the day before his death, a tulip garden alongside the trail was dedicated in his honor.
Paul Meijer is survived by his wife of 68 years, Dr. Marianne Schwarz Meijer, daughters Miriam C. Meijer and Corinne E. Meijer, sons Daniel J. W. Meijer and Mark E. Meijer, and four grandchildren. His first-born son, Onko F. Meijer, died as a child. His family and his many friends will miss his happy countenance, his bright mind, and his warm heart.
