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Norwegian-born American chemist whose development of a general theory of
irreversible chemical processes gained him the 1968 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
His early work in statistical mechanics attracted the attention of the Dutch
chemist Peter Debye, under whose direction Onsager studied at the Federal
Institute of Technology, Zurich (1926-28). He then went to the United States and
taught at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and Brown University, Providence,
R.I. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1935. He had joined the
faculty of Yale in 1933 and became professor of theoretical chemistry there in
1945.
Onsager's first achievement was to modify (1925) the Debye-Huckel theory of
electrolytic dissociation, which describes the motions of ions in solution, to
take into account Brownian movement. He received the Nobel Prize for his
pioneering work on nonequilibrium thermodynamics, which applied the laws of
thermodynamics to systems that are not in equilibrium--i.e., to systems in which
differences in temperature, pressure, or other factors exist. Onsager also was
able to formulate a general mathematical expression about the behaviour of
nonreversible chemical processes that has been described as the "fourth law
of thermodynamics."
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