Lars Onsager
Lars Onsager (
November 27,
1903 –
October 5,
1976) was a
Norwegian-
American physical chemist and theoretical chemist, winner of the
1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.He held the Gibbs Professorship of Theoretical Chemistry at Yale University.
Lars Onsager was born in Christiania (now
Oslo), Norway. His father was a
lawyer. After completing secondary school in Oslo, he attended the
Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) in
Trondheim, graduating as a
chemical engineer in
1925.
In
1925 he arrived at a correction to the
Debye-
Hückel theory of
electrolytic solutions, to take care of
Brownian movement of
ions in solution, and in
1926 published it. He made a trip to
Zürich, where Peter Debye was teaching, and confronted Debye, telling him his theory was wrong. He so thoroughly impressed Debye that he was invited to become Debye's assistant at the
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH), where he remained until
1928.
Eventually in
1928 he went to the
United States of America to take a faculty position at the
Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore, Maryland. At JHU he had to teach freshman classes in
chemistry, and it quickly became apparent that, while he was a genius at developing theories in physical chemistry, he had no talent for teaching. He was dismissed by JHU after one semester.
On leaving JHU, he took a position (involving the teaching of
statistical mechanics to graduate students in chemistry) at
Brown University in
Providence, Rhode Island, where it became clear that he was no better at teaching advanced students than freshmen, but he made significant contributions to statistical mechanics and
thermodynamics. The only graduate student who could really understand his lectures on electrolyte systems, Raymond Fuoss, worked under him and eventually joined him on the Yale chemistry faculty. In
1933, when the
Great Depression limited Brown's ability to support a faculty member who was only useful as a researcher and not a teacher, he was let go by Brown, being hired after a trip to
Europe by
Yale University, where he remained for most of the rest of his life, retiring in
1972.
His work at Brown was mainly concerned with the effects on
diffusion of
temperature gradients, and produced the
Onsager reciprocal relations, a set of equations published in
1929 and, in an expanded form, in
1931, in
statistical mechanics whose importance went unrecognized for many years. However, their value became apparent in the decades following
World War II, and by
1968 they were considered important enough to gain Onsager that year's
Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
In
1933, just before taking up the position at Yale, Onsager traveled to
Austria to visit
electrochemist Hans Falkenhagen. He met Falkenhagen's sister-in-law, Margrethe Arledter. They were married on
September 7,
1933, and had three sons and a daughter.
At Yale, an embarrassing situation occurred: he had been hired as a postdoctoral fellow, but it was discovered that he had never received a
Ph. D. While he had submitted an outline of his work in reciprocal relations to the
Norwegian Institute of Technology, they had decided it was too incomplete to qualify as a doctoral dissertation. He was told that he could submit one of his published papers to the Yale faculty as a dissertation, but insisted on doing a new research project instead. His dissertation, entitled, "Solutions of the
Mathieu equation of period 4 pi and certain related functions", was beyond the comprehension of the
chemistry and
physics faculty, and only when some members of the
mathematics department, including the chairman, insisted that the work was good enough that
they would grant the doctorate if the chemistry department would not, was he granted a Ph. D. in chemistry in
1935. Even before the dissertation was finished, he was appointed assistant professor in
1934, and promoted to associate professor in
1940. He quickly showed at Yale the same traits he had at JHU and Brown: he produced brilliant theoretical research, but was incapable of giving a lecture at a level that a student (even a graduate student) could comprehend. He was also unable to direct the research of graduate students, except for the occasional outstanding one.
In the late 1930s, Onsager turned his work direction to the
dipole theory of
dielectrics, making improvements in another area that had been studied by Peter Debye. However, when he submitted his paper to a journal that Debye edited in
1936, it was rejected; Debye would not accept Onsager's ideas until after
World War II. In the 1940s, he studied the
statistical-mechanical theory of
phase transitions in
solids, deriving a mathematically elegant theory which was enthusiastically received. He obtained the exact solution for the two dimensional Ising model at the critical point in 1944.
In
1945, Onsager was
naturalized as an
American citizen, and the same year he was awarded the title of
J. Willard Gibbs Professor of Theoretical Chemistry. This was particularly appropriate because Onsager, like
Willard Gibbs, had been primarily involved in the application of
mathematics to problems in
physics and
chemistry and, in a sense, could be considered to be continuing in the same areas where Gibbs had pioneered.
In
1947, he was elected to the
National Academy of Sciences, and in
1950 he joined the ranks of
Alpha Chi Sigma.
After
World War II, Onsager turned to new areas of interest. He proposed a theoretical explanation of the
superfluid properties of
liquid helium in
1949; two years later the
physicist Richard Feynman independently proposed the same theory. He also worked on the theories of
liquid crystals and the electrical properties of
ice. While on a Fulbright scholarship to
Cambridge, England, he worked on the magnetic properties of
metals. He developed important ideas on the quantization of magnetic flux in metals. He was awarded the
Lorentz Medal in 1958 and the Nobel Prize in 1968.
At age 70, Onsager was involuntarily retired as an emeritus professor at Yale, in
1973. He was then appointed Distinguished University Professor at the
University of Miami (
Florida). At the Center for Theoretical Studies at the University of Miami he remained active in guiding and inspiring postdoctoral students as his teaching skills, although not his lecturing skills, had improved during the course of his career. He developed interests in semiconductor physics, biophysics and radiation chemistry. However, his death came before he could produce any breakthroughs comparable to those of his earlier years.
He remained in Florida until his death from a heart attack in
Coral Gables, Florida in 1976. Onsager had a rivalry with Professor
John Gamble Kirkwood at Yale that they both took to their graves, placed next to one another at New Haven's Grove Street Cemetery. While Kirkwood's tombstone has a long list of awards and positions, including the
American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry, the Richards Medal, and the Lewis Award, Onsager's tombstone simply says "Nobel Prize, etc.".
The Collected Works of Lars Onsager (with Commentary) World Scientific Series in 20th Century Physics - Vol. 17 Editors: Per Chr Hemmer, Helge Holden and Signe Kjelstrup Ratkje (World Scientific, Singapore 1996) ISBN 981-02-2563-6.
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Lars Onsager profile, NNDB.
