Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff (30 August 1852–1 March 1911) was a Dutch physical and organic chemist and the first winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry. He is best known for his discoveries in chemical kinetics, chemical equilibrium, osmotic pressure, and stereochemistry.

In 1874 he accounted for the phenomenon of optical activity by assuming that the chemical bonds between carbon atoms and their neighbors were directed towards the corners of a regular tetrahedron.
Van 't Hoff published his work on stereochemistry in his book La chimie dans l'éspace in 1874.
In 1884, van 't Hoff published his research on chemical kinetics, titled Études de Dynamique chimique ("Studies in Chemical Dynamics"), in which he described a new method for determining the order of a reaction using graphics, and applied the laws of thermodynamics to chemical equilibria.
In 1885, van 't Hoff was appointed as a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.
In 1886, he showed a similarity between the behaviour of dilute solutions and gases.
In 1887, he and German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald founded an influential scientific magazine named Zeitschrift für physikalische Chemie ("Journal of Physical Chemistry").
1889 provided physical justification for the Arrhenius equation.
In 1896, he became a professor at the Prussian Academy of Science in Berlin.
In 1896 van 't Hoff moved to Germany where he finished his career at the University of Berlin in 1911.