Avenue Franklin Roosevelt 50, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium
Ilya Prigogine attended Université Libre de Bruxelles.
Career
Gallery of Ilya Prigogine
1970
Portrait of Professor Ilya Prigogine.
Gallery of Ilya Prigogine
1977
Oslo, Norway
Award winners at the Nobel Prize ceremony held in Oslo, Norway. From left to right: John Hasbrouck van Vleck, Sir Nevill Mott, Philip Warren Anderson, Prof Ilya Prigogine, Prof Rosalyn Yalow, Roger Guillemin, Andrew Schally, Bertil Ohlin and James Meade.
Gallery of Ilya Prigogine
1977
Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1977. (Photo by Pierre Vauthey)
Gallery of Ilya Prigogine
1977
Ilya Prigogine, accompanied by his seven-year-old son Pascal, receives acclaim from students and colleagues after he was named as the Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry.
Gallery of Ilya Prigogine
1977
Professor Ilya Prigogine, Belgian Professor at the Free University of Brussels seen at the blackboard taking a class.
Gallery of Ilya Prigogine
1977
Belgian Professor Ilya Prigogine of the Free University of Brussels, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and Physics.
Gallery of Ilya Prigogine
1977
Professor Ilya Prigogine, Belgian Professor at the Free University of Brussels seen at the blackboard taking a class.
Gallery of Ilya Prigogine
1988
France
Ilya Prigogine
Gallery of Ilya Prigogine
1988
Brussels, Belgium
Physicist and Chemist Ilya Prigogine in Brussels, March 1988. (Photo by Marc Deville)
Gallery of Ilya Prigogine
1988
Brussels, Belgium
Physicist and Chemist Ilya Prigogine in Brussels, March 1988. (Photo by Marc Deville)
Gallery of Ilya Prigogine
1988
Brussels, Belguim
Belgian physicist and chemist Ilya Prigogine at his home in Brussels in March 1988, Belgium. (Photo by Marc Deville)
Gallery of Ilya Prigogine
1996
Brussels, Belgium
Belgian physical chemist Viscount Ilya Prigogine (Nobel Laureate in 1977) poses at his home during a portrait session held on January 16, 1996, in Brussels, Belgium. (Photo by Ulf Andersen)
Gallery of Ilya Prigogine
1996
Brussels, Belgium
Belgian physical chemist Viscount Ilya Prigogine poses at his home during a portrait session held on January 16, 1996, in Brussels, Belgium. (Photo by Ulf Andersen)
Award winners at the Nobel Prize ceremony held in Oslo, Norway. From left to right: John Hasbrouck van Vleck, Sir Nevill Mott, Philip Warren Anderson, Prof Ilya Prigogine, Prof Rosalyn Yalow, Roger Guillemin, Andrew Schally, Bertil Ohlin and James Meade.
Ilya Prigogine, accompanied by his seven-year-old son Pascal, receives acclaim from students and colleagues after he was named as the Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry.
Belgian physical chemist Viscount Ilya Prigogine (Nobel Laureate in 1977) poses at his home during a portrait session held on January 16, 1996, in Brussels, Belgium. (Photo by Ulf Andersen)
Belgian physical chemist Viscount Ilya Prigogine poses at his home during a portrait session held on January 16, 1996, in Brussels, Belgium. (Photo by Ulf Andersen)
From being to becoming: Time and complexity in the physical sciences
(The line from philosophy to science goes both directions,...)
The line from philosophy to science goes both directions, in both the temporal and spatial realms. The author of this book attempts to make some sense of that relationship.
(Time, the fundamental dimension of our existence, has fas...)
Time, the fundamental dimension of our existence, has fascinated artists, philosophers, and scientists of every culture and every century. All of us can remember a moment as a child when time became a personal reality, when we realized what a "year" was, or asked ourselves when "now" happened. Common sense says time moves forward, never backward, from cradle to grave.
(Prigogine and Rice's highly acclaimed series, Advances in...)
Prigogine and Rice's highly acclaimed series, Advances in Chemical Physics, provides a forum for critical, authoritative reviews of current topics in every area of chemical physics. This volume focuses on recent advances in liquid crystals with significant, up-to-date chapters authored by internationally recognized researchers in the field.
(In this book, after discussing the fundamental problems o...)
In this book, after discussing the fundamental problems of current science and other philosophic concepts, beginning with controversies between Heraclitus and Parmenides, Ilya Prigogine launches into a message of great hope: the future has not been determined.
(Modern Thermodynamics: From Heat Engines to Dissipative S...)
Modern Thermodynamics: From Heat Engines to Dissipative Structures, Second Edition presents a comprehensive introduction to 20th-century thermodynamics that can be applied to both equilibrium and non-equilibrium systems, unifying what was traditionally divided into "thermodynamics" and "kinetics" into one theory of irreversible processes.
Ilya Prigogine was a Russian-born Belgian physical chemist. He won the Nobel prize in 1977 for investigating the irreversibility of processes in complex physical systems that are far from equilibrium conditions.
Background
Ilya Prigogine was born on January 25, 1917, in Moscow, Russian Federation. The son of a factory director, Prigogine was born in the year of the Russian revolution. When the Bolsheviks began to target industrialists, the family fled to western Europe - first to Germany in 1921, and then to Belgium, where Prigogine eventually took citizenship in 1949.
His father, Roman Prigogine, who died in 1974, was a chemical engineer from the Moscow Polytechnic. His mother, Yulia Vikhman, was a pianist. He had a brother Alexander, who was born in 1913.
Education
Ilya Prigogine was educated at the Athene school. As a young boy, Prigogine was interested in music, history, and archaeology. He studied chemistry and physics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and obtained his doctorate in 1939 under the tutelage of Théophile De Donder, a remarkable professor, who pioneered the development of modern physics in Belgium. Extending and deepening De Donder's work, Prigogine himself became a pioneer of the thermodynamics of irreversible processes.
Ilya Prigogine accepted the position of a professor at his alma mater, Université Libre de Bruxelles, in 1950. Over the course of his successful academic career, he rose through the ranks quickly and was appointed director of the International Solvay Institute in Brussels in 1959.
In 1959, he also started teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States; he would split his future academic career between the University of Texas and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He was later made Regental Professor and Ashbel Smith Professor of Physics and Chemical Engineering at Texas. He was affiliated with the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago from 1961 to 1966. In 1962, he became director of the International Institute of Physics and Chemistry in Solvay. He co-founded the Center for Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics, now the Center for Complex Quantum Systems, in Austin in 1967. Active in research from the post World War II period, he made many significant discoveries in the 1960s.
Working with his colleagues R. Balescu, R. Brout, F. Hénin, and P. Résibois, he formulated non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and mathematical models that showed how chemical reactions could produce complex, changing patterns.
Prigogine’s work on the application of the second law of thermodynamics to complex systems, including living organisms, was especially significant. The law states that in any isolated physical system, order inevitably dissolves into decay. However, Prigogine was of the opinion that as long as systems receive energy and matter from an external source, nonlinear systems (or dissipative structures) can go through periods of instability and then self-organization.
His pioneering dissipative structure theory proved influential in a wide variety of fields, ranging from physical chemistry to biology. It also paved the way for the development of new disciplines of chaos theory and complexity theory. In addition, it led to philosophical inquiries into the formation of complexity on biological entities.
In collaboration with Robert Herman, he developed the basis of the two-fluid model, a macroscopic traffic flow model to represent traffic in a town/city or metropolitan area, analogous to the two-fluid model in classical statistical mechanics. During the later years of his career, he focused upon the fundamental role of Indeterminism in nonlinear systems on both the classical and quantum levels. In collaboration with his colleagues, he proposed a Liouville space extension of quantum mechanics.
Ilya Prigogine wrote or was co-author of 20 books - including several with Isabelle Stengers - and almost 1,000 research articles. One of his best-known books is "La Fin des certitudes" (1996), co-authored by Isabelle Stengers and published in English in 1997 as "The End of Certainty: time, chaos, and the new laws of nature." In 1997, he also became a co-founder of the International Commission on Distance Education (CODE), a worldwide accreditation agency. He died on 28 May 2003, at the age of 86.
Prigogine’s work dealt with the application of the second law of thermodynamics to complex systems, including living organisms. The second law states that physical systems tend to slide spontaneously and irreversibly toward a state of disorder (a process driven by an increase in entropy); it does not, however, explain how complex systems could have arisen spontaneously from less-ordered states and have maintained themselves in defiance of the tendency toward maximum entropy. Prigogine argued that as long as systems receive energy and matter from an external source, nonlinear systems (or dissipative structures, as he called them) can go through periods of instability and then self-organization, resulting in more-complex systems whose characteristics cannot be predicted except as statistical probabilities. Prigogine’s work was influential in a wide variety of fields, from physical chemistry to biology, and was fundamental to the new disciplines of chaos theory and complexity theory.
Quotations:
"We grow in direct proportion to the amount of chaos we can sustain and dissipate."
"Entropy is the price of structure."
"The main character of any living system is openness."
"Order arises from chaos."
"The understanding of the complexity and the use of the creativity of nature, the continuation of the work of nature are the grand challenges for the scientists of the 21st century."
"Only when a system behaves in a sufficiently random way may the difference between past and future, and therefore irreversibility, enter into its description...The arrow of time is the manifestation of the fact that the future is not given, that, as the French poet Paul Valery emphasized, 'time is a construction'."
"Each society, as I’ve written elsewhere, betrays its own characteristic "time bias" - the degree to which it places emphasis on past, present, or future. One lives in the past. Another may be obsessed with the future."
Membership
Ilya Prigogine was a member of numerous societies, such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Romanian Academy of Science, Royal Society of Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden, Correspondent de la Society Royale des Sciences, Class of Physics and Mathematics, Academy, of Sciences, Gottingen 1970, Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1971, Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina 1970, and many others.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
,
United States
1960
Romanian Academy of Science
,
Romania
1965
Royal Society of Sciences
,
Sweden
1967
Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften
,
Austria
1971
Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina
,
Germany
1970
Personality
After his Nobel achievement, Prigogine's popularity in his adopted homeland was such that he was constantly recognized in the street, and no restaurant in Brussels would allow him to pay for a meal. But he also retained a strong sense of his roots and invited many Russian scholars to work at the Solvay institute. From the mid-1950s, after Stalin's death, he visited Moscow regularly, staying at the old family home that, remarkably, was still occupied by relatives.
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Henri Bergson, Théophile de Donder
Artists
Salvador Dali
Connections
Ilya Prigogine’s first marriage was to Belgian poet, Hélène Jofé, with whom he had a son. The marriage ended in divorce.
He married Polish-born chemist, Maria Prokopowicz, in 1961. This union also produced a son.