Ilya Prigogine — physical chemist with roots in the Russian Empire
Ilya Romanovich Prigogine was born in Moscow on 25 January 1917, a month before the February Revolution, into a Jewish family. His father, Roman Prigogine, was a chemical engineer who owned a factory in Moscow. After the factory was nationalised during the Civil War, the family left Soviet Russia in 1921. According to an account published by the St Petersburg Polytechnic University, they spent about a year in Lithuania; they then lived in Germany, where Ilya went to school in Berlin, and in 1929 settled in Belgium, at Ixelles near Brussels.
He first intended to study law at the Free University of Brussels, but turned to chemistry, under the influence of Théophile de Donder, a pioneer of the thermodynamics of irreversible processes. He took his doctorate in 1941, by most accounts, and from 1947 was a professor at the university. He became a Belgian citizen in 1949.
His work concerned systems far from equilibrium. Classical thermodynamics described systems that settle into equilibrium; Prigogine showed that in open systems that exchange energy and matter with their surroundings, new ordered structures can arise spontaneously, which he called dissipative structures. The idea offered a physical framework for the emergence of order in chemistry and biology. He received the Francqui Prize in 1955 and became director of the International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry in Brussels in 1959. From 1967 he also directed a centre for statistical mechanics and thermodynamics at the University of Texas at Austin, later named after him.
In 1977 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone, for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures. With the philosopher Isabelle Stengers he wrote La Nouvelle Alliance, on the new dialogue between science and nature, and later The End of Certainty. In 1989 King Baudouin made him a viscount, and he was elected a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His brother Alexandre became an ornithologist.
He died in Brussels on 28 May 2003, aged eighty-six; one obituary gives 25 May.
Tracing the roots — Moscow (Russia)
Born in Moscow on 25 January 1917, a month before the February Revolution, the son of the chemical engineer Roman Prigogine; in 1921 the family left Soviet Russia, by way of Lithuania and Germany, and in 1929 settled in Belgium.
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Moscow (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"The future is not given. It is created."