Ilya Prigogine

Ilya Prigogine
(1917 - 2003)

Russian-born Belgian physical chemist who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1977 for contributions to nonequilibrium thermodynamics.
Prigogine was taken to Belgium as a child. He received his Ph.D. in 1941 at the Free University in Brussels, where he accepted the position of professor in 1947. In 1962 he became director of the International Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Solvay, Belg. He also served as director of the Center for Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics at the University of Texas, Austin, from 1967. The center was later renamed the Ilya Prigogine Center for Statistical Mechanics and Complex Systems in his honour.

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 (this process is known as 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 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.