Ilya Prigogine

Ilya Prigogine’s first marriage was to Belgian poet, Hélène Jofé, with whom he had a son. The marriage ended in divorce.

He married Polish-born chemist, Maria Prokopowicz, in 1961. This union also produced a son.

He died on 28 May 2003, at the age of 86.

Ilya Romanovich Prigogine was born on 25 January 1917, in Moscow, Russian Empire, to Roman (Ruvim Abramovich) Prigogine, a chemical engineer, and his wife Yulia Vikhman, a pianist. He had one brother.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 started when he was a small baby. His family grew exceedingly critical of the new Soviet system and left Russia in 1921. They first went to Germany and then moved to Belgium in 1929.

As a young boy, Prigogine was interested in music, history and archaeology. However, he chose science for his formal education and received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemistry from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He received a doctorate in 1941.

Ilya Prigogine accepted the position of a professor at his alma mater, Université Libre de Bruxelles, in 1950. Over the course of his successful academic career he rose through the ranks quickly and was appointed director of the International Solvay Institute in Brussels in 1959.

In 1959, he also started teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States; he would split his future academic career between the University of Texas and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He was later made Regental Professor and Ashbel Smith Professor of Physics and Chemical Engineering at Texas.

He was affiliated with the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago from 1961 to 1966. In 1962, he became director of the International Institute of Physics and Chemistry in Solvay.

He co-founded the Center for Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics, now the Center for Complex Quantum Systems, in Austin in 1967. Active in research from the post World War II period, he made many significant discoveries in the 1960s.

Working with his colleagues R. Balescu, R. Brout, F. Hénin and P. Résibois, he formulated non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and mathematical models that showed how chemical reactions could produce complex, changing patterns.

Ilya Prigogine is best known for his work on dissipative structures, a term he coined while working on such structures which were observed in physical chemtry experiments in the late 1960's. Examples of such structures in everyday life can be found in convection, turbulent flow, cyclones, hurricanes and living organisms.