LARS ONSAGER - The National Academies Press

LARS ONSAGER 199
Modern Analysis 14 (Lars's favorite text), read it with enjoyment.
He suggested to Professor Hill, chairman of chemistry,
that if the Chemistry Department felt uneasy at doing so, the
Mathematics Department would be happy to recommend the
award of the degree. Not wishing to be upstaged, the chemists
sponsored the thesis. 15
One can see this incident as an illustration of Onsager's
pride in his mathematical skill—a skill that, throughout his
life, was more evident to his colleagues in theoretical physics
than to the vast majority of his fellow chemists. Before publishing
new results he always insisted on making sure that
there were no mathematical loopholes in any of his arguments,
but he never lost his sense of proportion to the extent
of cultivating mathematical rigor for its own sake. On a new
derivation of Birkhoff's strong ergodic hypothesis he once
remarked in exasperation: "To be any more immaculate they
will have to begin sterilizing the paper as well as the theorem!"
In 1934 Onsager was appointed an assistant professor in
the Chemistry Department at Yale and, in 1935, was awarded
his Ph.D. He settled down to family life on Whitney Avenue
in New Haven, and in the course of the next few years Gretl
bore him four children, Erling Frederick (named after his
grandfather), Inger Marie (now Mrs. Kenneth R. Oldham),
Hans Tanberg, and Christian Carl. The eldest son and the
youngest later graduated from Yale, but none of the children
went into science.
At about this time the Onsagers bought a farm in Tilton,
New Hampshire, with a farmhouse and about a hundred
acres of land. Lars used to grow vegetables with enthusiasm
and engaged in carpentry and other practical pursuits. A
14 See n. 3 above.
15 B. Hille, "Ionic channels of nerve: questions for theoretical chemists," BioSystems
8(1977): 195-99.