Ilya Prigogine · Science & Medicine
Dissipative Structures
1917, Moscow, Russia — 2003, Brussels, Belgium
Belgium (Brussels) · United States (Austin, Texas)
Ilya Prigogine is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Dissipative Structures
Origins and early life
Ilya Prigogine was born in Moscow on 25 January 1917, a few months before the October Revolution, into a Jewish family: his father Ruvim was a chemist who owned a paint factory, his mother Yulia a pianist trained at the Moscow Conservatory.
Work and career
The factory was nationalised, and in 1921 the family left; they settled at last in Belgium, and Prigogine spent his career in Brussels. Classical thermodynamics described systems at or near equilibrium, where order runs down. Prigogine asked what happens far from equilibrium, where energy keeps flowing through a system, and showed that such systems do not simply decay — they can spontaneously organise themselves into new structures, which he called dissipative structures.
A flame, a whirlpool, a living cell: order maintained by the very flow that would otherwise destroy it. The idea gave the study of complex systems a physical footing and pressed the question of why time runs one way. He received the Francqui Prize in 1955, the Rumford Medal in 1976 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. He died on 28 May 2003.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Nobel Prize Chemistry 1977
This page is published in seven languages from an English source. The translations are reviewed, but a mistake can still slip through. If you spot one on this profile — a wrong word, a lost date, a sentence that says something the English does not — please tell us.
Dissipative Structures
Source: Nobel Prize Chemistry 1977
Similar Contributors
Jerome Karle
Michael Woolfson
Paul Sigler
