The Swedish chemist and physicist Svante August Arrhenius (1859-1927) is known for his theory of electrolytic dissociation.

Svante Arrhenius was born on Feb. 19, 1859, at Vik near Uppsala, the son of Svante Gustav and Carolina Thunberg Arrhenius. His father was a land surveyor and later a supervisor at the University of Uppsala.

Arrhenius's intellectual abilities became obvious early. Against his parents' wishes, the blond, blue-eyed, rubicund child taught himself to read at the age of 3. He acquired a fantastic arithmetical skill and a pictorial memory by observing his father adding columns in his account books. In his future scientific work, he was especially fond of discovering relationships and laws from masses of data. At the age of 8, he entered the fifth grade of the cathedral school, where he distinguished himself particularly in physics and mathematics and from which he graduated, the youngest and ablest student, in 1876.

Theory of Electrolytes...