This, the third of a series of thirteen articles on Nobel Laureates in chemical dynamics, features the work of Wilhelm Ostwald, who won the Nobel Prize in 1909 for his work on catalysis, equilibria, and reaction rates. The first two articles in this series discussed two of Ostwald's students--Jacobus van't Hoff (Nobel 1901) and Svante Arrhenius (Nobel 1903). Ostwald's own studies of catalysis were guided by the work of those two former students. Ostwald's name remains associated with the catalytic process used to manufacture nitric acid from ammonia.

The 1998 Nobel Prize was awarded to Walter Kohn "for his development of the density-functional theory" and to John Pople "for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry." They enabled improved energy calculations on molecules and other multi-atom systems. Chemists have taken advantage of those developments to perform calculations on systems during reactive encounters, thereby obtaining a better understanding of chemical dynamics and allowing for predictions regarding the course of chemical reactions based on the energies of various possible transition states.

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The third Nobel Prize for research in chemical dynamics awarded during the middle decades of the Twentieth Century is reviewed. Manfred Eigen, Ronald Norrish, and George Porter received the Nobel Prize in 1967 "for studies of extremely fast chemical reactions, effected by disturbing the equilibrium by means of very short impulses of energy," i.e., temperature jump, pressure jump, and flash photolysis.

This article describes a number of approaches utilizing spreadsheets in chemical education.