Arrhenius, Svante August 1859-1927
Swedish physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner

Born in Wijk, near Uppsala, he went to the University of Uppsala in 1876, where he studied both chemistry and physics, and in 1881 he moved to Stockholm. His doctoral thesis on the experimental determination and theoretical interpretation of the electrical conductivities of dilute solutions of electrolytes was barely accepted by the University of Uppsala, whose scientific establishment was outraged by its novel ideas. Arrhenius was fortunately already highly regarded by Wilhelm Ostwald, Jacobus van't Hoff and other prominent physical chemists, and was awarded a travelling scholarship by the Academy of Sciences. In 1891 he became a lecturer in the Stockholm H�gskola and was promoted to professor in 1895. In 1902 he received the Davy Medal of the Royal Society and was elected a Foreign Member of the Society in 1911. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1903. He became director of the Nobel Institute of Physical Chemistry in Stockholm in 1905, a post he held until a few months before his death. His other main contribution to physical chemistry was his formulation in 1889 of the dependence of the rate coefficient of a chemical reaction on temperature (the Arrhenius equation). In later life he applied the methods of physical chemistry to the chemistry of living matter, and he was also interested in astrophysics, particularly the origins and destinies of stars and planets.