# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/lars-onsager
# Generated: 2026-08-31T15:52:13.304Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/lars-onsager"
name: "Lars Onsager"
slug: "lars-onsager"
description: "A physical chemist who worked in a corner of thermodynamics so abstract that even other scientists struggled to see the point — until his equations quietly became foundational to everything from superconductors to cell membranes."
tagline: "American physical chemist and theoretical physicist (1903-1976)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Onsager_1968.jpg?width=1200"
gender: "male"
country:
  name: "Norway"
  isoCode: "NO"
category:
  name: "Scientists"
  slug: "scientists"
profileType:
  name: "Scientist"
  slug: "scientist"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1903-11-27"
deathDate: "1976-10-05"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
  popularity:           56.44
  momentum:             0
  historical:           23.42286533333333
  currentAttention:     0
  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  70
  trendDirection:       "FALLING"
ranks:
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  country:  199
  category: null
tags:
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    slug: "scientists"
  - name: "Scientist"
    slug: "scientist"
  - name: "Physics"
    slug: "physics"
  - name: "Chemistry"
    slug: "chemistry"
  - name: "Norway"
    slug: "norway"
  - name: "Europe"
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  - name: "20th Century"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Lars Onsager was born in Norway on 27 November 1903 and crossed into physical chemistry by way of theoretical physics, a combination rare enough to set him apart. He landed at Yale, where he eventually held the Gibbs Professorship of Theoretical Chemistry — a chair named for the American thermodynamics pioneer. His work lived in the kinds of problems that don't announce themselves: the reciprocal relations governing irreversible processes, the mathematics of systems drifting toward equilibrium. In 1968 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for those contributions. He died on 5 October 1976, having spent decades making the invisible machinery of matter a little less so.