Pierre-Gilles de Gennes

He got married to Anne Marie Elisabeth Eugenie Rouet in 1954 and the couple was married till his death. They had three children.

He died on 18 May 2007 in Orsay, France, at the age of 74. The reasons behind his death are unknown.

Pierre Gilles de Gennes was born on 24 October 1932 in Paris, France to Robert Joachim Pierre de Gennes and his wife Martha Marie Yvonne Morin-Pons. His father was a physician, while his mother worked as a nurse.

He did not go to a traditional school and tutored at home and that continued till the time he was 12-year-old. Subsequently, he enrolled at the Ecole Normale Superieure and graduated from there in 1955. One of his key subjects at the Ecole Normale Superieure was German.

In 1955, he started working in the capacity of a research engineer at the Atomic Research Centre, located in the region of Saclay in southern Paris. Two years later, he was awarded his doctorate by the institute. During his time at the Atomic Research Centre, he was primarily involved in the field of magnetism and neutron scattering.

In 1959, he went to the United States as a visiting post doctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkley. He worked alongside another well-known researcher of the time, Charles Kittel during his stint at Berkeley. Subsequently, he went to work for the French Navy and worked for them for a period of 2 years and three months.

After the completion of his stint with the French Navy, he was appointed as a professor at the Orsay campus of the University of Paris-Sud in 1961 and before long he founded the group ‘Orsay group of semiconductors’. He worked on that particular project for a period of seven years before he changed his field to that of liquid crystals.

He started working at College de France as a professor in 1971 and during his stint there, he became a part of the joint research on polymer physics initiated by College de France, Starsbourg and Saclay, known as STRASACOL. He worked as a professor at the College de France for a period of five years.

In 1976, the Ecole Superieure Physique et de Chimie Industrielles appointed him as director and he continued at the position for 26 years. Four years after joining the institute, he started his research on interfacial studies and the dynamics involved in wetting and adhesion. His research on discovering a process of studying the order phenomena in liquid crystals and polymers won him the Nobel Prize in Physics.

His most important work in a career that saw him conduct several path breaking studies in different institutions is without doubt his work on the order phenomena of different matter that saw him use mathematical techniques to work out general theories on matter. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990 for the same and was even called the ‘Isaac Newton of our time’ by the committee.