Call for nominations for the 2027 Lars Onsager Lecturer and Lars Onsager Professor

Permanent faculty in the Departments of Physics, Chemistry and Biomedical Science, Chemical Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, Biotechnology and Food Science, as well as Mathematical Sciences, are invited to propose candidates for the 2027 Lars Onsager Lecturer and Lars Onsager Professorship at NTNU. Further information, including a list of previous Onsager Lecturers and Professors, is available on the Onsager website.

Candidates for the Lars Onsager Professorship should be outstanding scientists willing to spend 3-6 months at NTNU. The Onsager Professor will receive a salary (trinn 80 i Statens regulativ) while at NTNU. In addition, NTNU will reimburse necessary travel expenses and insurance. There is a 10% overhead for the host department and 10% to cover running expenses.

Please submit your proposals (in English, as a PDF only) by email to the chair of the Onsager committee, Prof. Arne Brataas (Arne.Brataas@ntnu.no). The deadline is April 10, 2026.

The Lars Onsager Lecture 2026

Photo: P. Badge

Avi Wigderson, Herbert H. Maass Professor at the School of Mathematics, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Wigderson received the 2021 Abel Prize in mathematics and the 2024 Turing Award in computer science

The Lars Onsager Lecture will be presented on
Thursday, 22 October 2026 at 10:15-11:30 in Lecture Hall EL5 at Gløshaugen
The title is
Randomness


Abstract:
Is the universe inherently deterministic or probabilistic? Perhaps more importantly - can we tell the difference between the two? Humanity has pondered the meaning and utility of randomness for millennia. There is a remarkable variety of ways in which we utilize perfect coin tosses to our advantage: in statistics, cryptography, game theory, algorithms, gambling... Indeed, randomness seems indispensable!

Which of these applications survive if the universe had no randomness in it at all? Which of them survive if only poor-quality randomness is available, e.g. that arises from "unpredictable" phenomena like the weather or the stock market?

A computational theory of randomness, developed in the past four decades, reveals (perhaps counter-intuitively) that very little is lost in such deterministic or weakly random worlds. In the talk I'll explain the main ideas and results of this theory.

The day before, Wednesday, 21 October 2026 at 14:15-15:30 in Lecture Hall S7 at Gløshaugen,
Avi Wigderson will give the following colloquium:

Imitation games


Abstract
One of Alan Turing's most influential papers is his 1950 Computing machinery and intelligence, in which he introduces the famous "Turing test" for probing the nature of intelligence by evaluating the abilities of machines to behave as humans. In this test, which he calls the Imitation Game, a (human) referee has to distinguish between two (remote and separate) entities, a human and a computer, only by observing answers to a sequence of arbitrary questions to each entity. Mountains of words have been written on support, critique, variants of and experimentation with this idea and its value. It is not the purpose of this lecture to discuss this body of work.
Instead, this lecture will exposit, through examples from a surprisingly diverse array of settings, the remarkable power of this abstract idea of such a test, as revealed in the past few decades of work in the theory of computation and discrete mathematics. I will discuss variations of the Imitation Game in which we change the nature of the referee, and of the objects to be distinguished. These variations yield analogs of the Turing test, which lead to foundational work in cryptography, pseudorandomness, privacy and number theory, impacting math, science, technology and society.
No special background will be assumed.

For further details, please contact Prof. Helge Holden

Previous Onsager Lecturers

Lars Onsager Professorship

The Lars Onsager Professor 2026

Dr. Jorge Casares Velázquez, Profesor de Investigación, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain.

For further details, please contact Prof. Manuel Linares or Prof. Helge Holden.

Previous Lars Onsager Professors

Lars Onsager (1903–1976)

Lars Onsager was a Norwegian-American chemist and physicist. Onsager was born in Oslo. He held a Ch.E. degree (1925) from NTH (Norwegian Institute of Technology, later NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology).

Onsager migrated to the USA in 1928, and became an American citizen in 1945. Onsager was a J. Willard Gibbs Professor at Yale University.

Onsager was awarded the The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1968 for his work done in 1931 on irreversible thermodynamics.