Svante Arrhenius

Svante August Arrhenius was a Swedish physical chemist whose visionary intellect helped establish physical chemistry as an independent scientific branch. In his 1884 doctoral thesis at Uppsala University, Arrhenius proposed the theory of electrolytic dissociation: that salts break down into positively and negatively charged ions when dissolved in water, even in the absence of an electrical current. Though initially awarded the lowest passing grade by skeptical professors, his theory was embraced by Wilhelm Ostwald and J. H. van 't Hoff, winning him the 1903 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Arrhenius also formulated the fundamental Arrhenius equation (k = A e^(-Ea/RT)) quantifying how chemical reaction rates depend exponentially on temperature and activation energy. In 1896, Arrhenius published the world's first quantitative climate model calculating how variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide alter Earth's surface temperature, predicting that industrial coal combustion would cause human-induced global warming.