Lars Onsager
Lars Onsager ( born November 27, 1903 in Kristiania, now Oslo, † October 5, 1976 in Coral Gables (Florida ) near Miami) was a Norwegian physical chemist and theoretical physicist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1968.
Life
Onsager studied from 1920 Chemical Engineering at the Technical University in Trondheim ( Norway), was from 1926 to 1928 research assistant at the ETH Zurich in 1928 Peter Debye and received a teaching position at Brown University in Providence (USA). He was from 1934 to 1973 professor of chemistry at Yale University in New Haven ( USA), first as an Assistant Professor, from 1940 as an associate professor and from 1945 as J. Willard Gibbs Professor of Theoretical Chemistry. After that, he was from 1972 to 1976 professor at the Center for Theoretical Studies of the University of Miami in Coral Gables near Miami.
Onsager was a member of the Norwegian, Swedish and Dutch Academies of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS ) and the Royal Society. He was a member of the American Physical Society, American Chemical Society, the Bunsen Society. He received the Rumford Gold Medal of the AAAS, the Lorentz Medal of the Dutch Academy of Sciences and the National Medal of Science from the United States.
In honor of Lars- Onsager prize is named, and the Lars Onsager Lecture and Professorship.
Services
Onsager was awarded in 1968 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for " the discovery of the eponymous inter-relationships, which for the thermodynamics of irreversible processes are fundamentally " ( Onsagersche reciprocity relations ).
Onsager worked among other things on the conductivity of solutions on electrolytes, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, the theory of turbulence and developed a theory of isotope separation, which was also used in the Manhattan Project. An outstanding performance Onsagers was the analytical description and exact solution of the two-dimensional Ising model, an important model system of statistical mechanics.
Writings
- Per Christian Hemmer (ed.): The collected works of Lars Onsager, World Scientific 1996