Svante August Arrhenius was born in Vik, Sweden in 1859. At age 25 he turned in his PhD thesis at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. His PhD examining committee did not think very highly of his thesis and rated it 4th class. His oral thesis defense did not fair much better as they rated it as only 3rd class. Arrhenius left Sweden for five years to work with Oswald, Boltzmann and van't Hoff. In 1889 his interpretation of temperature-dependent equation by van't Hoff led to the universal accepted Arrhenius equation for kinetic rate laws in chemistry.
He received the Nobel Prize in 1903. From 1905 until his death in 1927 he was director of Physical Chemistry at the Nobel Institute.