Heike Kamerlingh Onnes

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853–1926) was a Dutch experimental physicist who served as Professor of Experimental Physics and Meteorology at Leiden University. He is best known for liquefying helium in 1908 and for discovering superconductivity in 1911, when he observed that the electrical resistance of mercury vanished at temperatures near absolute zero. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1913 for his investigations on the properties of matter at low temperatures.