Nadine Gordimer’s speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1991 Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Your Excellencies, Fellow Laureates, Ladies and Gentlemen, When the six-year-old daughter of a friend of mine overheard her father telling someone that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize, she asked whether I had ever received it before. He replied…

more

Presentation Speech by Professor Ingvar Lindgren of the December 10, 1991 Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, College de France, Paris, for his investigations of liquid crystals and polymers. De Gennes has shown that mathematical…

more

P. G. de Gennes was born in Paris, France, in 1932. He majored from the École Normale in 1955. From 1955 to 1959, he was a research engineer at the Atomic Energy Center (Saclay), working mainly on neutron scattering and magnetism, with advice from A. Herpin, A. Abragam and J. Friedel (PhD 1957). During 1959…

16 October 1991 has decided to award the 1991 Nobel Prize in Physics to Professor Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, College de France, Paris, France for discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to more complex forms of matter, in particular to liquid crystals and polymer. Order and disorder in…

Photo: L. Falk             Plastic, rubber, plexiglas, gels and textile fibres such as nylon and polyester are all synthetic materials made of polymer molecules.   A Frisbee is a mixture of crystalline (ordered) and amorphous (disordered) polymer structures. This makes the material both strong and flexible.   Each polymer molecule…