Ilya Prigogine

Ilya Romanovich Prigogine was born in Russia on 25 January 1917 and became a Belgian physical chemist whose work cut against the grain of classical thermodynamics. Where the old models assumed systems slide toward disorder, Prigogine studied irreversibility and non-equilibrium states — places where energy flows through a system and spontaneous organization appears. His theory of dissipative structures mapped how complexity arises in everything from chemical reactions to living cells. The Francqui Prize came in 1955, the Rumford Medal in 1976, and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977 for contri…