Lars Onsager

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.