Ilya Prigogine

Dissipative structures: order far from equilibrium (1945-1977)

• The Nobel presenter said his method for testing the stability of these structures could be used to study problems as varied as city traffic, insect communities, the development of biological structures and the growth of cancer cells.^[4]
• A 2018 review finds dissipative structures throughout biology, from heart and brain rhythms, circadian clocks and the cell cycle to cell-fate switches in embryos and pigment stripes in animal skin.^[14]
• His 1979 two-fluid model of town traffic, built with Robert Herman, matched trip-time data from many cities and introduced one parameter for the quality of a city's road network.^[16]
• Britannica describes his work as fundamental to the new fields of chaos theory and complexity theory.^[8]
• In 1967 he founded a center for statistical mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, one of five research centers named for him, and he wrote about 20 books and nearly 1,000 articles.^[7]
• In 1990 chemists reported a sustained, standing Turing-type pattern in a chemical reaction, the kind of spatial dissipative structure Prigogine's group had analyzed in the 1960s.^{[14],[17],[18]}

We make no numeric impact claims for Prigogine. His contribution is a way of understanding nature, not a product, and any count of lives or dollars would be invented. His theory of dissipative structures explained how open systems fed by a steady flow of energy can organize themselves into patterns and rhythms without breaking the second law of thermodynamics. That idea shaped the study of chemical oscillations and Turing patterns, the modeling of biological rhythms from heartbeats to circadian clocks and the cell cycle, and the wider fields of chaos and complexity science. His traffic models with Robert Herman carried the same thinking into engineering. He also built institutions, the Brussels school and the Austin center, that trained generations of researchers, and in popular books he argued for a dialogue between science and the humanities. Parts of his later philosophy of time remain disputed among physicists.

Fundamental scienceEducationTransportation

No number is given here on purpose. Some contributions cannot be counted honestly, and we would rather describe them than invent a figure.

• Minor

  Disputed claims about time and determinism

  In later books, especially The End of Certainty (1996, with Isabelle Stengers), Prigogine argued that instability makes determinism untenable and irreversibility fundamental. Physicists such as Jean Bricmont rejected these foundational claims as confused, while stressing that this was not a criticism of Prigogine's scientific work in general.^[12],[15]

• Minor

  Borrowed by postmodern writing

  Bricmont documented how Prigogine's ideas were stretched into loose social analogies, such as the futurist Alvin Toffler's talk of a leap from Newtonianism to 'Prigoginianism', and noted that his name came up often in postmodern writing, although Prigogine himself was not anti-scientific.^[15]

• Minor

  A common misreading of the second law

  Some popular accounts, including his Telegraph obituary, say his theories suggested the second law of thermodynamics might be broken. In his own Nobel account, order far from equilibrium arises in a way that conforms to the second law, because entropy is exported to the surroundings.^[2],[5],[6]

• 1921

  Exile

  After the Soviet regime nationalized his father's factory, the family left Russia when he was four and lived as migrants in Lithuania and Germany.^{[2],[11],[12]}

• 1929

  Exile

  The family left Germany for Brussels in 1929; a 1980 profile cited by the Jewish Virtual Library says they moved to get away from the growing Nazi movement, and other accounts add Germany's economic troubles and rising antisemitism.^{[9],[12],[19]}

• 1940

  Persecution

  Under German occupation from May 1940, Jews in Belgium, most of them foreign or stateless like Prigogine, lost civil rights, property and jobs; from 1942 they had to wear a yellow star, and nearly 25,000 were deported to Auschwitz.^[13]

• 1941

  War

  The Université Libre de Bruxelles closed in 1941 rather than obey the occupier's demands; he continued teaching in its clandestine courses until the liberation in 1944.^[10],[12]

• 1943

  Imprisonment

  He was arrested as a Jew, reportedly in 1943 together with his future wife Hélène Jofé, and released weeks later (accounts range from two to ten weeks) after interventions that reportedly included one by Queen Elisabeth.^{[10],[12],[19]}

• 1946

  Other

  His focus on irreversible processes met open hostility: at a 1946 physics meeting in Brussels a leading specialist told him such passing phenomena mattered less than equilibrium.^[2],[6]

Prigogine was born in Moscow into a Jewish family. His father, Ruvim (Roman) Abramovich Prigogine, was a chemical engineer who owned a paint factory; his mother, Yulia Leivikovna Vikhman, was a pianist who had studied at the Moscow Conservatory. Both came from Jewish merchant families. Under the German occupation of Belgium he was arrested as a Jew and later released. The Jewish Virtual Library says he rarely spoke publicly about being Jewish and quotes Belgium's Jewish community calling him low-profile about it. His outlook was secular: in 2003 he signed the Humanist Manifesto.^{[2],[6],[9],[10],[12],[19]}

1. January 25, 1917

   Born in Moscow, a few months before the October Revolution.^[1],[2]

2. 1921

   The family leaves Soviet Russia, spends about a year in Lithuania, then lives as migrants in Germany until settling in Brussels in 1929.^[2],[6],[11]

3. 1941

   Earns his doctorate at the Université Libre de Bruxelles under Théophile De Donder; the university closes in protest against the Nazi occupier.^{[2],[10],[12]}

4. 1943

   Arrested by the German occupiers as a Jew, reportedly with his future wife Hélène Jofé; both are released weeks later after interventions.^{[10],[12],[19]}

5. 1945

   Formulates the theorem of minimum entropy production for steady states close to equilibrium.^[2]

6. 1947

   Appointed professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (some sources date his full professorship to 1951).^{[6],[8],[10],[11]}

7. 1949

   Becomes a Belgian citizen, twenty years after arriving in Brussels.^[2],[11]

8. 1959

   Becomes director of the International Solvay Institutes in Brussels, a post he held until his death (some sources date the appointment to 1962).^{[6],[7],[8],[11],[12]}

9. 1967

   First presents the idea of a 'dissipative structure', in a 1967 conference paper titled 'Structure, dissipation and life'; joins the University of Texas at Austin and founds a research center there.^[2],[7],[14]

10. 1968

    With René Lefever publishes the model reaction later nicknamed the Brusselator, showing how chemical rhythms and patterns can arise.^{[2],[14],[17]}

11. October 11, 1977

    Awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, unshared, for non-equilibrium thermodynamics and the theory of dissipative structures.^[1],[3]

12. 1979

    Publishes La Nouvelle Alliance with Isabelle Stengers, later a best-seller in English as Order out of Chaos.^[6],[12]

13. 1989

    Made a viscount by King Baudouin of Belgium.^[6],[7]

14. May 28, 2003

    Dies in Brussels at age 86.^[1],[7]

1. 1.Ilya Prigogine: Facts · Nobel Prize Outreach (nobelprize.org)
2. 2.Ilya Prigogine: Biographical (Nobel autobiography) · Nobel Prize Outreach (nobelprize.org), 1977
3. 3.Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1977 · Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (nobelprize.org), 1977
4. 4.Award ceremony speech, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1977 (Stig Claesson) · Nobel Prize Outreach (nobelprize.org), 1977
5. 5.Time, Structure and Fluctuations (Nobel Lecture, 8 December 1977) · Nobel Prize Outreach (nobelprize.org), 1977
6. 6.Vicomte Ilya Prigogine (obituary), archived copy · The Daily Telegraph, 2003
7. 7.Nobel Prize-winning physical chemist dies in Brussels at age 86 (archived copy) · The University of Texas at Austin, 2003
8. 8.Ilya Prigogine (archived copy) · Encyclopaedia Britannica
9. 9.Ilya Prigogine · Jewish Virtual Library (American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise)
10. 10.Ilya Prigogine, Moscou 1917-Bruxelles 2003 (biographical panel, Pierre Marage) · Université Libre de Bruxelles
11. 11.Prof. Dr. Ilya Prigogine: CV · Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings (Lindau Mediatheque)
12. 12.Ilya Prigogine · Wikipedia
13. 13.Belgium (Holocaust Encyclopedia) · United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
14. 14.Dissipative structures in biological systems: bistability, oscillations, spatial patterns and waves (Goldbeter, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 376:20170376) · Royal Society (via PubMed Central), 2018
15. 15.Science of Chaos or Chaos in Science? (Jean Bricmont, arXiv:chao-dyn/9603009) · arXiv, 1996
16. 16.A two-fluid approach to town traffic (Herman and Prigogine, Science 204:148-151) · Science (record via PubMed), 1979
17. 17.Symmetry Breaking Instabilities in Dissipative Systems. II (Prigogine and Lefever, J. Chem. Phys. 48:1695) · The Journal of Chemical Physics (AIP), 1968
18. 18.Experimental evidence of a sustained standing Turing-type nonequilibrium chemical pattern (Castets, Dulos, Boissonade, De Kepper, Phys. Rev. Lett. 64:2953) · Physical Review Letters (record via PubMed), 1990
19. 19.Пригожин, Илья Романович (Prigogine, Ilya Romanovich) · Russian Wikipedia