author
Svante Arrhenius
1859–1927
A pioneering Swedish scientist, he helped lay the foundations of physical chemistry and became the first Swedish Nobel laureate. He is also remembered for early work linking carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to changes in Earth’s temperature.
3 Audiobooks
Worlds in the making: The evolution of the universe
by Svante Arrhenius
A világegyetem élete és megismerésének története a legrégibb időtől napjainkig
by Svante Arrhenius
The Destinies of the Stars
by Svante Arrhenius
About the author
Born in Sweden in 1859, Svante Arrhenius trained as a physicist but became one of the key figures in the rise of physical chemistry. His work on electrolytic dissociation helped explain how salts, acids, and bases behave in solution, and it changed the way chemists understood ions and reactions in water.
In 1903 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, becoming the first Swedish person to win a Nobel Prize in any field. He later served as director of the Nobel Institute in Stockholm and remained an influential scientific voice for the rest of his life.
Arrhenius is also widely remembered outside chemistry for his 1896 work on the warming effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That study was far ahead of its time, and it is one reason his name still appears in discussions of climate science today. He died in Stockholm in 1927.