Henry Eyring

Henry Eyring (February 20, 1901 to December 26, 1981) was a Mexican-born American theoretical chemist, born in the Mormon colony of Colonia Juarez, Chihuahua, who died in Salt Lake City, Utah. He developed transition state theory, also called absolute rate theory, which explains the rate of a chemical reaction in terms of an activated complex sitting at the energy peak between reactants and products, linking chemistry to quantum theory and statistical mechanics. Eyring spent much of his career at the University of Utah, and although he never won a Nobel Prize, he received the National Medal of Science in 1966 and the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1980 for a theory that remains a cornerstone of physical chemistry.