Prigogine, Ilya

Prigogine, Ilya

(prĭg`əjēn), 1917–2003, Belgian chemist, b. Moscow. He was raised and educated in Belgium, receiving his doctorate in 1941 and joining the faculty of the Free Univ. of Brussels in 1947. In 1959 he became director of the International Solvay Institutes in Brussels, a position he held until his death. He also founded and served as director (1967–2003) of what is now the Ilya Prigogine Center for Studies in Statistical Mechanics and Complex Systems at the Univ. of Texas at Austin. For his development of mathematical models of irreversible thermodynamics (as opposed to the classical reversible systems), he was awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Prigogine's work was important in the development of the field of complexitycomplexity,
in science, field of study devoted to the process of self-organization. The basic concept of complexity is that all things tend to organize themselves into patterns, e.g.
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Prigogine, Ilya

 

Born Jan. 25, 1917, in Moscow. Belgian physicist and physical chemist. Member of the Royal Academy of Belgium (1953); academy’s president (1969).

Prigogine graduated from the Free University of Brussels and began teaching there in 1942. He was appointed professor in 1947. In 1962 he was made director of the International Institutes of Physics and Chemistry (Solvay, Belgium), and in 1967 of the Prigogine Center for Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics at the University of Texas.

Prigogine’s major work has been on the thermodynamics and statistical mechanics of nonequilibrium processes. He is responsible for one of the fundamental theorems in this field—the Prigogine theorem—and has been an initiator in the application of nonequilibrium processes to the study of biology. Prigogine is a member of many academies throughout the world.

WORKS

In Russian translation:
Vvedenie v termodinamiku neobratimykh protsessov. Moscow, 1960.
Neravnovesnaia statisticheskaia mekhanika. Moscow, 1964.
Termodinamicheskaia teoriia struktury, ustoichivosti i fluktuatsii. Moscow, 1973. (With P. Glansdorff.)