Svante August Arrhenius (19.02.1859-2.10.1927) was a Swedish physical chemist, one of the founders of physical chemistry, and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1901). He was born on the Vik estate near Uppsala. He graduated from the universities of Uppsala (1878) and Stockholm (1884). In 1891-1902 he worked at the Higher Technical School in Stockholm (from 1895 as professor, from 1896 as rector), and in 1905-27 he was director of the Department of Physical Chemistry of the Nobel Institute.
In 1887 he worked out the theory of electrolytic dissociation (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1903). He studied the rate of chemical reactions and established in 1889 how it depends on temperature (the Arrhenius equation). He also worked on problems of astrophysics, in particular the origin and evolution of the heavenly bodies, and on the application of physico-chemical laws to biological processes.
He was a member of many academies of sciences and a foreign member of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1925). The H. Davy, J. Gibbs (1911) and M. Faraday (1914) medals.