Dissipative structures prigogine autobiography

(b. Moscow, Russia, 25 January 1917, d. Brussels, Belgium, 28 May 2003), chemistry, irreversible thermodynamics.

Prigogine was awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize “for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures.” His investigations into the origins of irreversibility in nature laid the groundwork for many important advances in nonlinear dynamics and complexity in the second half of the twentieth century.

Early Development Prigogine, whose childhood years were marked by a spatial odyssey across Europe, occasioned by the Russian Revolution, was to spend most of his adult life probing the nature of motion through time.

The son of Roman Prigogine, a chemical engineer, and Julia Wichman Prigogine, a conservatory student, the young Prigogine, accompanied by his parents and his older brother Alexander, arrived in Belgium by way of Lithuania and Berlin at the age of twelve and soon became fascinated by history,