Van der Waals' doctoral research culminated in an 1873 dissertation that provided a semi-quantitative theory describing the gas-liquid change of state and the origin of a critical temperature, Over de Continuïteit van den Gas- en Vloeistoftoestand (Dutch; in English, On the Continuity of the Gas and Liquid State). It was in this dissertation that the first derivations of what we now refer to as the Van der Waals equation appeared. James Clerk Maxwell reviewed and lauded its published content in the British science journal Nature, and Van der Waals began independent work that would result in his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1910, which emphasized the contribution of his formulation of this "equation of state for gases and liquids".
