His parents were Erling Onsager, a barrister before the Norwegian Supreme Court, and Ingrid Kirkeby Onsager. Onsager's early education was somewhat unorthodox as he was taught by private tutors, by his own mother, and at a somewhat unsatisfactory rural private school. Eventually he entered the Frogner School in Oslo and did so well that he skipped a grade and graduated a year early. Overall, his early schooling provided him with a broad liberal education in philosophy, literature, and the arts. He is said to have become particularly fond of Norwegian epics and continued to read and recite them to friends and family throughout his life.
In 1920, Onsager entered the Norges Tekniski Ho slash gskole in Trondheim where he planned to major in chemical engineering. The fact that he enrolled in a technical high school suggests that he was originally interested in practical rather than theoretical studies. Onsager had not pursued his schooling very long, however, before it became apparent that he wanted to go beyond the everyday applications of science to the theoretical background on which those applications are based. Even as a freshman in high school, he told of making a careful study of the chemical journals, in order to gain background knowledge of chemical theory.
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