From Pia Grüner, MA, Chief of the Secretariat of The Royal Danish Academy ofSciences and Letters:

Kirstine Meyer (b. Bjerrum) was rewarded with the Gold Medal of the Academyin 1899. Her contribution was published in our series: SN 6.IX.3. (p.155-225).1899. It was decided to give her the Gold Medal at a meeting on 24 February1899.

There is an evaluation of the paper in the Academy yearbook of 1899 byProfessors Christian Christiansen (1875-1917) and Peter Kristian Prytz(1891-1929). It is in Danish. Pia Grüner has kindly supplied this Englishtranslation.

The prize subject was "to examine whether there exists a generalequation of state for all fluid bodies." The evaluation then goes on:"This seems to have proved probable by the examinations by v.d. Waals andothers. That they all seem more or less concordant has long been well known,but recent examinations have also indicated that a cohesion as simple as theone mentioned by v.d. Waals is hardly to be found.

"The author of the present paper has made this question a subject of thoroughdiscussion. At first he tests if the law in its original form is correct. Dueto this the equation of state must assume the same form in all matter, if youuse the critical values as unit for volume, pressure and temperature. If youare now aware of these "critical" quantities it is very simple totest the validity of the law. However it is very complicated to measurecritical quantities because different sources of error, which probably have nogreat importance in other circumstances, for instance a minor addition of apermanent gas, might make a big difference at the critical point. The authorhas made an effort to be independent by using units, proportional to thecritical quantities. This result is reached by presupposing that thetemperature by which the specific gravity of a liquid is 100 times bigger thanthe specific gravity of its saturated steam. According to this method he hascompared 20 subject matters. The result is that the deviations between the mattersare so big that the law of v.d. Waal in its original form cannot be right.Moreover the author tries whether it is possible to ameliorate the connectionby choosing other quantities than the critical data. In an ingenious way, whichwould be too complicated to explain at this occasion, he succeeds in provingthat it is in fact possible to get a result in this way. It turns out that youmay keep the critical pressure as a unit, but must choose units for volume andtemperature deviating somewhat from the critical quantities. This veryextensive and interesting research now reaches to the determination of the newunits, and after they have been found it is easy to prove the validity of thelaw. The result of this work is then that there must exist a common equation ofstate for all fluid bodies that can be given the following form: f (p, v + , T +ß, a, b, c), = 0, where p, v, T are pressure, volume, temperature, , ß, a, b,c, constants, adjusting to the nature of the matter. It is obvious that theauthor holds the scientific insight demanded to go through with this work; hehas used the available experimental material in a thorough and profound way,and he has presented a genuine answer to the prize offered at a level that wecan only hope that the author intends to publish the results. Therefore we canonly recommend the Academy that this work is rewarded with the Gold Medal ofthe Academy."

C. Christiansen , K. Prytz

Accordingly it was decided to award the author of this paper the Gold Medal ofthe Academy. By opening the nametag, it turned out that the author was MrsKirstine Meyer, b. Bjerrum, M.Sc.