The Lars Onsager Lecture and Professorship
- Lars Onsager (1903–1976)
Norwegian-American chemist and physicist. Born in Oslo, Ch.E. degree from Norges Tekniske Høiskole, Trondheim, in 1925. Emigrated to the USA in 1928 and became an American citizen in 1945. J. Willard Gibbs Professor at Yale University. Received the 1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work done in 1931 on irreversible thermodynamics. (Biographical note).
The Lars Onsager Lecture and the Lars Onsager Professorship are awarded by the Onsager committee.
- Present Onsager Lecturer
The Lars Onsager Lecture for 2011 was presented by Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Peter Hänggi, Institut für Physik, Universität Augsburg, Germany. The lecture took place on October 6. It had the title "The Ring of Brownian Motion: The good, the bad and some simply silly" (abstract).
Professor Hänggi presented an additional lecture on Friday, October 7 at 12:15 in Auditorium R9. Title: "Sweep a qubit to entangle states and to gauge its environment".
For further information, please contact Prof. Helge Holden.
- Present Onsager Professor
The Lars Onsager Professorship for 2011 has been awarded to Dr. George W. Scherer, W. L. Knapp Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Princeton University. For further information, please contact Prof. Mari-Ann Einarsrud or Prof. Helge Holden.
On Thursday, Jan. 19, Prof. Scherer presented a lecture for a general audience with title "Protecting culture from nature – Materials Science Issues in Conservation of Stone".
He also received the Lars Onsager medal.
Thanks to the generosity of Lars Onsager's sons and daughter, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology has established a Lars Onsager archive located at NTNU Library/Gunnerus Library in Trondheim. A substantial part of the archive has now been made freely available in digital form.
A general reference to the scientific works of Lars Onsager is:
The Collected Works of Lars Onsager (With Commentary)
(P.C. Hemmer, H. Holden, S.K. Ratkje, editors)
World Scientific, Singapore 1996
A biography on Lars Onsager was recently published by P.C. Hemmer and E. Hiis Hauge in the book "Norwegian Nobel Prize Laureates", (Olav Njølstad, ed.), Universitetsforlaget, 2006. Boken fins også på norsk "Norske nobelprisvinnere", (Olav Njølstad, red.) Universitetsforlaget, 2005. The article on Lars Onsager
Both the Lecturer and the Professor receive the Onsager medal.
Artist: Harald Wårvik, minted by Den kongelige mynt, Kongsberg
