The Lars Onsager Lecture and Professorship
The Lars Onsager Lecture and Professorship
Call for nominations for the 2025 Lars Onsager Lecturer and Lars Onsager Professor
We invite permanent faculty at the Departments of Physics, Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, Biotechnology, and Food Science, as well as Mathematical Sciences, to propose candidates for the 2025 Lars Onsager Lecturer and Lars Onsager Professorship here at NTNU.
Candidates for the Lars Onsager Professorship should be outstanding scientists willing to spend 3-6 months here at NTNU. The Onsager Professor will receive a salary (trinn 80 i Statens regulativ) while at NTNU. In addition, NTNU will reimburse travel expenses to NTNU and necessary insurance. The host department will receive a 10% overhead and 10% to cover running expenses.
Please submit proposals (in English and pdf format only) by email to the chair of the Onsager committee, Prof. Helge Holden (helge.holden@ntnu.no). The deadline is 15 January 2025.
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.
Lars Onsager Lecture 2024
The 2024 Lars Onsager Lecturer:
Sir Martin Hairer, KBE, FRS
Sir Martin Hairer KBE FRS from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland and Imperial College, London. Prof. Hairer is working in stochastic analysis and stochastic dynamics. He received the Fields Medal in mathematics in 2014, and the Breakthrough Prize in mathematics in 2021.
The 2024 Lars Onsager Lecture will be presented on Thursday 24 October at 14:15–15:00 in S8, Gløshaugen. The title of his talk is
Taming infinities
Abstract: Some physical and mathematical theories have the unfortunate feature that if one takes them at face value, many quantities of interest appear to be infinite! What's worse, this doesn't just happen for some exotic pieces of abstract mathematics, but in the standard theories describing some of the most fundamental aspects of nature. Various techniques, usually going under the common name of “renormalisation” have been developed over the years to address this, allowing mathematicians and physicists to tame these infinities. We will tip our toes into some of the conceptual and mathematical aspects of these techniques and we will see how they have recently been used in probability theory to study equations whose meaning was not even clear until now.
In addition, he will give a mathematics colloquium on Friday 25 October at 10:15–11 in Kjelhuset KJL22 with title
Top Lyapunov exponent for advection-diffusion
Abstract: We show that, for a class of random velocity fields that cover solutions to the stochastic Navier-Stokes equations, the Eulerian Lyapunov exponent for passive scalar advection / diffusion is finite, uniformly over initial data. The proof relies on constructive bounds on the projective process that allow us to keep track of its dependence on the diffusion coefficient.
Lars Onsager Professorship
Onsager Professor 2024
Dr. Alexei Gruverman, the Charles Bessey Professor of Physics, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA.
For further details, please contact Prof. Dennis Meier or Prof. Helge Holden.
The Onsager Medal
The Onsager Lecturer and the Onsager Professor receive the Onsager Medal.
Artist: Harald Wårvik. Minted by The Mint of Norway (Det Norske Myntverket), Kongsberg, Norway.
The Lars Onsager Archive
Thanks to the generosity of Lars Onsager's sons and daughter, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology has established a Lars Onsager Archive.
The Lars Onsager Archive is located at the Dora Library (a repository library for the NTNU University Library) and the Gunnerus Library (the Special Collections of the NTNU University Library) in Trondheim, Norway.
A substantial part of the archive has now been made freely available in digital form:
Biographical Material
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 (pdf)
by P.C. Hemmer and E. Hiis Hauge is printed in the book «Norwegian Nobel Prize Laureates», (Olav Njølstad, ed.), Universitetsforlaget, 2006. - In Norwegian: Boken er også utgitt på norsk, «Norske nobelprisvinnere», (Olav Njølstad, red.) Universitetsforlaget, 2005.
The Onsager Committee
The Lars Onsager Lecture and the Lars Onsager Professorship are awarded by the Onsager Committee which consists of:
- Professor Helge Holden (Chairman), Department of Mathematical Sciences, NTNU
- Professor Arne Brataas, Department of Physics, NTNU
Regulations for the Lars Onsager Lecture and the Lars Onsager Professorship.
The Nobel Prize 1968
Video at YouTube: King Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden, Lars Onsager and other nobilities and prize winners.
Yale University
Lars Onsager in his office at the Sterling Chemistry Laboratory at Yale University.
Onsager stamp
Lars Onsager on stamp. Norwegian Post's 2003 series of stamps with Nobel Laureates.