Lars Onsager

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(1903 - 1976)
http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/deceased-members/20001605.html
http://yufind.library.yale.edu/yufind/Record/3319681
https://history.aip.org/phn/11607029.html
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1968 was awarded to Lars Onsager "for the discovery of the reciprocal relations bearing his name, which are fundamental for the thermodynamics of irreversible processes".

In 1933 Onsager was appointed Sterling and Gibbs Fellow at Yale University, where he was to remain for the greater part of his life. Having awarded him a postdoctoral fellowship, the Chemistry Department was embarrassed to discover that he had no Ph.D.
The Reciprocal Relations had been published two years before, but an outline of his results, submitted to his alma mater in Trondheim, had been judged unacceptable for a doctorate as it stood. This setback had naturally upset him, and he felt uncomfortable at being addressed as "Dr. Onsager" when he had no such entitlement. His colleagues suggested that he should try for a Yale Ph.D. Lars had already taken the relevant course work and orals, and as for the thesis, any of his published work would do.
Lars felt, however that he should write something new and it was soon ready - a thesis entitled 'Solutions of the Mathieu Equation of Period 4[pi] and certain related functions' (1935). The chemists were quite out of their depth, and the physicists, too; eventually the thesis was sent over to the Mathematics Department, where Professor Einar Hille, himself an expert in the subject matter of Whittaker and Watson's 'Modern Analysis', Lars's favorite text, read it with enjoyment. He suggested to Professor Hill, chairman of chemistry, that if the Chemistry Department felt uneasy at doing so, the Mathematics Department would be happy to recommend the award of the degree. Not wishing to be upstaged, the chemists sponsored the thesis. http://books.google.com/books?id=5wv3-WxzWJ4C&lpg=PP1&pg=PA18#v=onepage&q&f=true
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