Cato Maximilian Guldberg

Cato Maximilian Guldberg was a Norwegian mathematician and chemist, born in Christiania in 1836, best known as a pioneer in physical chemistry. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Christiania, took his diploma in 1859 and received the Crown Prince's gold medal that year for a dissertation in pure mathematics. He became a professor of applied mathematics at the Royal Frederick University in 1869. With his brother-in-law Peter Waage he proposed the law of mass action in 1864, which attracted little attention until Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff reached a similar relationship in 1877, and in 1890 he published the Guldberg rule, which relates the normal boiling point of a liquid to two thirds of its critical temperature on the absolute scale.