Background
Clay-Jolles was born in 1881 in Assen, Netherlands to Eva Dina Halbertsma and Maurits Aernout Diedrick Jolles.
Clay-Jolles was born in 1881 in Assen, Netherlands to Eva Dina Halbertsma and Maurits Aernout Diedrick Jolles.
After secondary school, Clay-Jolles attended the University of Groningen. She commuted each day from Assen by train until 1903 when she transferred to the University of Leiden. She was one of the few women who studied physics at the university.
There she began her doctoral research on low-temperature physics under Heike Kamerlingh Onnes.
She worked on her thesis until December 1908 when she left her studies to devote herself to her family.
She was the only girl to attend the local secondary school, passing both the alpha and beta series exams at the end of her studies there. These exams tested her knowledge of the humanities and science, respectively. In Java, Clay-Jolles returned to research, working as an assistant in a laboratory researching vacuum pumps.
During this time she also edited and typed all of her husband"s publications.
In 1921 she was hired to edit a series of lectures by Nobel laureate Hendrik Antoon Lorentz. The two discovered that atmospheric radiation depended on geographic latitude.
They did this by comparing the ultraviolet light at their location in Java to the ultraviolet light at the Batavia Observatory. Clay-Jolles published their findings in 1933 in the East Indian scientific journal, Natuurkundig Tijdshrift voor Nederlandsch-Indië.