Belle Dumé, Science
Writer at PhysicsWeb, 30
May 2003 http://physicsweb.org/article/news/7/5/17
Ilya Prigogine, the winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his
work on non-equilibrium thermodynamics, has died aged 86 in Brussels. At the
time of his death, Prigogine was director of the International Solvay
Institute for Physics and Chemistry in Brussels - a post he has held since
1959. He was also professor of physics and chemical engineering at the
University of Texas where he founded the Centre for Thermodynamics and
Statistical Mechanics. This centre was later named after him.
Ilya Prigogine was born in Moscow in 1917. He moved to Germany with his
family in 1921, and then to Belgium eight years later. He graduated with a PhD
in chemistry from the Université Libre in Brussels in 1941 and remained there
to continue with his research in thermodynamics.
Prigogine is best known for extending the second law of
thermodynamics to systems that are far from equilibrium, and
demonstrating that new forms of ordered structures could exist under such
conditions. Prigogine called these 'dissipative structures' because they cannot
exist independently of their environment. According to the second law of
thermodynamics, ordered systems disintegrate into disordered ones. However,
Prigogine showed that the formation of dissipative structures allows
order to be created from disorder in non-equilibrium systems.
These structures have since been used to describe phenomena such as the growth
of cities and the physics of car traffic.
Prigogine received many awards and prizes during his life, including the
Medaille d'Or (France) and the Imperial Order of the Rising Sun (Japan). He
wrote almost a thousand research articles and many books, which include
"Order out of Chaos" (1989) and "The End of Certainty"
(1997).
