Raoult's law is named after the French chemist François-Marie Raoult, who first proposed it in 1887. It states that the partial vapor pressure of a component in a mixture is equal to the vapor pressure of the pure component multiplied by its mole fraction in the mixture. Raoult’s law assumes that the component obeys ideal gas behavior and there are no intermolecular interactions between the solute and solvent molecules. It only works for ideal solutions and doesn’t apply to solutions that exhibit significant deviations from ideal behavior.