Svante Arrhenius

Svante August Arrhenius was born in Sweden on 19 February 1859 and trained as a physicist, but his work bridged disciplines in ways that would define physical chemistry as a field. In 1903 he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the first Swede to take home a Nobel in any category. Two years later he became director of the Nobel Institute and held the post until his death. His most prescient work applied physical chemistry to atmospheric science: he estimated how much warming could be expected from increased carbon dioxide in the air, laying groundwork that would become modern climate science. In the 1960s, Charles David Keeling's measurements confirmed CO₂ was climbing and that Arrhenius's greenhouse hypothesis could account for observable warming. He died on 2 October 1927, leaving his name on an equation, definitions of acids and bases, craters on the Moon and Mars, a mountain, and a laboratory at Stockholm University.