Jacobus Henrcus Van't Hoff was born in Rotterdam in 1852. He received his PhD from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands in 1874, although his thesis was controversial. He was appointed professor of chemistry, mineralogy and geology at the University of Amsterdam where he remained for 18 years before moving to the University of Berlin in 1896. The majority of Van't Hoff's work was on the fundamental aspects of thermodynamics and it's application to solutions for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1901. His monograph "Etudes de Dynamique Chimique" was the fist monograph on chemical kinetics. This monograph discussed the basis for the equation giving the temperature dependence of the equilibrium constant.
Van't Hoff, along with Oswald and Arrhenius, is considered a founder of Physical Chemistry. Van't Hoff died in 1911.