Ilya Prigogine
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Ilya Romanovich Prigogine
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1977
Born: 25 January 1917, Moscow, Russia
Died: 28 May 2003, Brussels, Belgium
Affiliation at the time of the award: Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium; University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA
Prize motivation: “for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures”
Prize share: 1/1
Work
Thermodynamics is about heat and its transformation into other forms of energy—basically involving statistical descriptions of atomic and molecular movements. Irreversible thermodynamic processes go in only one direction, usually toward more disorder. However, during the 1960s Ilya Prigogine developed a theory about dissipative structures, which maintains that long before a state of equilibrium is reached in irreversible processes, orderly and stable systems can arise from more disordered systems. The result has been applied in a great many areas.
Nobel Prizes and laureates
Six prizes were awarded for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. The 12 laureates' work and discoveries range from proteins' structures and machine learning to fighting for a world free of nuclear weapons.
See them all presented here.
