Lars Onsager

Lars Onsager was born on November 27, 1903, in Christiania. Educated in chemical engineering at the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) in Trondheim, he made early corrections to the Debye–Hückel theory of electrolytic solutions while still in his early twenties.

Emigrating to the United States, Onsager held the prestigious J. Willard Gibbs professorship of theoretical chemistry at Yale University. In 1931, he published his reciprocal relations in irreversible thermodynamics, establishing mathematical symmetry in cross-phenomena such as thermoelectricity and thermal diffusion, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1968. He also achieved the first exact mathematical solution of the two-dimensional Ising model with magnetic field zero, a milestone in statistical mechanics.