Henry Eyring was a Mexican-born American theoretical chemist whose primary contribution was in the study of chemical reaction rates and intermediates. He was born on February 20, 1901 in Colonia Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. He received the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1980 and the National Medal of Science in 1966 for developing the Absolute Rate Theory or Transition state theory of chemical reactions, one of the most important developments of 20th-century chemistry. Eyring was elected president of the American Chemical Society in 1963 and the Association for the Advancement of Science in 1965. He was awarded the National Medal of Science (1966), ACS's Priestley Medal (1975), Sweden's Berzelius Medal (1979), and the Wolf Foundation Prize in Chemistry (1980), among many honors. Throughout his academic career, Eyring applied quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics to an extremely broad range of problems in physical chemistry. He died on December 26, 1981 in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States.