Ilya Prigogine

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Ilya Prigogine
University of Texas, Austin
University of Chicago
Doctoral advisorThéophile de Donder
Doctoral students

irreversibility
.

Prigogine's work most notably earned him the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, as well as the Francqui Prize in 1955 and the Rumford Medal in 1976.

Biography

Early life and studies

Prigogine was born in Moscow a few months before the October Revolution of 1917, into a Jewish family.[1] His father, Ruvim (Roman) Abramovich Prigogine, was a chemical engineer who studied at the Imperial Moscow Technical School and owned a soap factory; his mother, Yulia Vikhman, was a pianist who attended the Moscow Conservatory. In 1921, the factory having been nationalized by the new Soviet regime and the feeling of insecurity rising amidst the civil war, the family left Russia. After a brief period in Lithuania, they went to Germany and settled in Berlin; 8 years later, due to the poor economic situation and the creeping emergence of Nazism, they moved on to Brussels, where Prigogine received Belgian nationality in 1949. His brother Alexandre (1913–1991) became an ornithologist.[2]

As a teenager, Prigogine was interested in music, history and archeology. He graduated from the Athenée d'Ixelles in 1935, majoring in Greek and Latin. His parents encouraged him to become a lawyer, and he initially enrolled in law studies at the Free University of Brussels. At that time he developed an interest in psychology and the study of behavior; in turn, reading about these subjects triggered an interest in chemistry, as chemical processes impact the mind and body; this also triggered a more fundamental interest in physics, as they explain chemistry. He ended up dropping out from the law faculty.[3]

Prigogine afterwards simultaneously enrolled in chemistry and physics at the Free University of Brussels, something he achieved with "uncommon success"; he earned the equivalent of a Master's degree in both disciplines in 1939, and a PhD in chemistry in 1941 under Théophile de Donder.[3][4]

Early career, World War II

He started his research career under the German occupation of Belgium. From 1940 onwards he gave clandestine lectures to students. In 1941, the university formally closed to protest the forced appointment of Flemish pro-Nazi New Order professors by the occupiers;[5] he continued giving clandestine lectures until the Liberation of Belgium in 1944. During that time window he also published 21 articles. In 1943, Prigogine and his future wife Hélène Jofé were arrested by the Germans; after multiple interventions including by the Queen Elisabeth, they were eventually released a couple of weeks later.[3]

Later career

In 1951, he became a full professor at his alma mater; at 34 years old, he was the youngest ever full professor at the science faculty in Brussels.[3] In 1959, he was appointed director of the International Solvay Institute in Brussels, Belgium. In that year, he also started teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States, where he later was appointed Regental Professor and Ashbel Smith Professor of Physics and Chemical Engineering. From 1961 until 1966 he was affiliated with the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago and was a visiting professor at Northwestern University.[6][7] In Austin, in 1967, he co-founded the Center for Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics, now the Center for Complex Quantum Systems.[8] In that year, he also returned to Belgium, where he became director of the Center for Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics.

He was a member of numerous scientific organizations, and received numerous awards, prizes and 53 honorary degrees. In 1955, Prigogine was awarded the

UNAM in Mexico City
.

Prigogine was first married to Belgian poet Hélène Jofé (as an author also known as Hélène Prigogine) and in 1945 they had a son Yves. After their divorce, he married Polish-born chemist Maria Prokopowicz (also known as Maria Prigogine) in 1961. In 1970 they had a son, Pascal.[12]

In 2003 he was one of 22 Nobel Laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.[13]

Research

Prigogine defined

dissipative structures and their role in thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium, a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. In summary, Ilya Prigogine discovered that importation and dissipation of energy into chemical systems could result in the emergence of new structures (hence dissipative structures) due to internal self reorganization.[14] In his 1955 text, Prigogine drew connections between dissipative structures and the Rayleigh-Bénard instability and the Turing mechanism.[15]

Dissipative structures theory

Dissipative structure theory led to pioneering research in

self-organizing systems, as well as philosophical inquiries into the formation of complexity in biological entities and the quest for a creative and irreversible role of time in the natural sciences
.

With professor

two fluid model, a traffic model in traffic engineering
for urban networks, analogous to the two fluid model in classical statistical mechanics.

Prigogine's formal concept of

which?] with scientific rigor.[citation needed
]

Work on unsolved problems in physics

See also:
Unsolved problems in physics

In his later years, his work concentrated on the fundamental role of

arrow of time problem of thermodynamics and the measurement problem of quantum mechanics.[18]

Prigogine co-authored several books with Isabelle Stengers, including The End of Certainty and La Nouvelle Alliance (Order out of Chaos).

The End of Certainty

In his 1996 book, La Fin des certitudes, written in collaboration with Isabelle Stengers and published in English in 1997 as The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature, Prigogine contends that determinism is no longer a viable scientific belief: "The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes to believe in determinism." This is a major departure from the approach of

irreversibility and instability
.

Prigogine traces the dispute over determinism back to

solar radiation, weather and the emergence and evolution of life. Like weather systems, organisms are unstable systems existing far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Instability resists standard deterministic explanation. Instead, due to sensitivity to initial conditions, unstable systems can only be explained statistically, that is, in terms of probability
.

Prigogine asserts that

Newtonian physics has now been "extended" three times:[citation needed] first with the introduction of spacetime in general relativity, then with the use of the wave function in quantum mechanics, and finally with the recognition of indeterminism in the study of unstable systems (chaos theory
).

Publications

Ilya Prigogine Prize for Thermodynamics

The Ilya Prigogine Prize for Thermodynamics was initialized in 2001 and patronized by Ilya Prigogine himself until his death in 2003. It is awarded on a biennial basis during the Joint European Thermodynamics Conference (JETC) and considers all branches of thermodynamics (applied, theoretical, and experimental as well as quantum thermodynamics and classical thermodynamics).

See also

References

  1. ^ Multiple sources:
  2. doi:10.1111/j.1474-919X.1992.tb07238.x
    .
  3. ^ a b c d Lefever, René (8 November 2013). "NOTICE BIOGRAPHIQUE D'ILYA PRIGOGINE". Hosted on ResearchGate. Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium. Retrieved 9 March 2023.
  4. ^ "FAREWELL TO ILYA PRIGOGINE (appendix)". Chaos and Innovation Research Unit, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. 6 June 2003.
  5. ISBN 9782874950018
    .
  6. ISBN 978-1317546788
    .
  7. ^ "Northwestern Nobels: Northwestern Magazine – Northwestern University". www.northwestern.edu. Retrieved 5 January 2021.[permanent dead link]
  8. ^ "Nobel Prize-winning physical chemist dies in Brussels at age 86". Utexas.edu. 28 May 2003. Archived from the original on 2 October 2012. Retrieved 19 December 2012.
  9. ^ "History – International Academy of Science, Munich". www.ias-icsd.org. Retrieved 30 March 2018.
  10. ^ International Council for Scientific Development. Presidium. ias-icsd.org
  11. ^ "Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh: Honorary Graduates". www1.hw.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 18 April 2016. Retrieved 5 April 2016.
  12. ^ Ilya Prigogine. (2003). Curriculum Vitae of Ilya Prigogine In Is future given. World Scientific.
  13. ^ "Notable Signers". Humanism and Its Aspirations. American Humanist Association. Archived from the original on 5 October 2012. Retrieved 4 October 2012.
  14. PMID 18202170
    .
  15. ^ I. Prigogine, Introduction to Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes, Charles C. Thomas Publisher, Springfield, Illinois, 1955
  16. ISBN 978-0-387-35725-6, Chapter B.3 "Lioville space and open quantum systems", p. 248
  17. ISBN 978-981-256-047-6, p. 62
  18. ISBN 978-0-470-14158-8
    .
  19. ^ Prigogine & Stengers (1997), p. 19–20.
  20. doi:10.1063/1.3051153. p. 78
  21. doi:10.1063/1.2890013. p. 70
  22. doi:10.1063/1.2810725
    .

Further reading

External links

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