LARS ONSAGER - The National Academies Press

184 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS
NORWAY (1903-1925)
Lars was born in Oslo on 27 November, 1903, to Erling
and Ingrid Kirkeby Onsager. Erling was a barrister, and it is
said that the family had interests in the steel industry, though
Lars was later at pains to deny that his father was "a steel
tycoon." His early education was liberal; his friends found
him, in later life, extraordinarily well read in classical literature
and philosophy and admired his taste in music and the
fine arts. He attended high school in Oslo and at an early age
familiarized himself with Norwegian literature, including the
verse epics he loved to recite to his family and friends in later
life, both in the original and in his own English translations.
In 1920 Lars was admitted to the Norges Tekniske Hogskole
in Trondheim to study chemical engineering in preparation
for a technical career. But his inclinations were mainly
intellectual; he had already bought a copy of Whittaker and
Watson's classic monograph, Modern Analysis, 3 and he worked
through most of the (notoriously difficult) examples in his
spare time. This early discipline equipped him for some of
his most spectacular later achievements, notably his famous
solution of the Ising problem in two dimensions.
In other ways as well, Onsager's time as a student at the
Norwegian Institute of Technology was prophetic of his later
scientific work. As a freshman chemist he was introduced to
the current theory of electrolyte solutions, according to
which the properties of an electrolyte should be additive, not
just over molecules, but even over the constituent ions.
"In spite of some idealization," he declared later, "it sufficed for a great
many purposes; it eased many tasks no end, and we were eternally grateful
for that. However, very soon the journals rather than the textbooks taught
3 E. T. Whittaker and G. N. Watson, A course of modern analysis (Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press, 1902), 4th ed., 1927.