Chemical kinetics, also known as
reaction kinetics, is the study of
rates of chemical processes. Chemical kinetics includes investigations of how different experimental conditions can influence the speed of a chemical reaction and yield information about the
reaction's mechanism and
transition states, as well as the construction of mathematical models that can describe the characteristics of a chemical reaction. In 1864,
Peter Waage and
Cato Guldberg pioneered the development of chemical kinetics by formulating the
law of mass action, which states that the speed of a chemical reaction is proportional to the quantity of the reacting substances.