Born on the eve of revolution
Ilya Romanovich Prigogine was born in Moscow on January 25, 1917, into a Jewish family, a few months before the October Revolution. His father, Ruvim (Roman) Prigogine, was a chemical engineer trained at the Moscow polytechnic who owned a small paint factory; his mother, Yulia Vikhman, had studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory. According to his mother, Ilya could read musical scores before he could read printed words, and the piano remained his favourite pastime all his life.
The new Soviet regime nationalized the family factory, and amid civil war and insecurity the Prigogines left Russia in 1921. After a short stay in Lithuania they settled in Berlin. In 1929, with Germany’s economy in trouble and Nazism on the rise, they moved again, to Brussels, where Ilya and his older brother Alexandre grew up. Ilya became a Belgian citizen in 1949. His brother became an ornithologist.
From law to chemistry
At school in Brussels, the Athénée d’Ixelles, Prigogine studied Greek and Latin and was drawn to history, archaeology and music. His parents hoped he would become a lawyer, and he began studying law at the Free University of Brussels. Reading about human behaviour led him to psychology, psychology to the chemistry of the brain, and chemistry to physics. He left law, enrolled in both chemistry and physics, and earned degrees in both in 1939, followed by a doctorate in chemistry in 1941.
Two teachers shaped him. Théophile De Donder, a former schoolteacher turned professor, had developed a way to describe irreversible chemical change within thermodynamics, the science of heat and energy. Jean Timmermans, an experimentalist, taught him to test theory against careful measurement. From the start Prigogine was fascinated by time, by the fact that natural processes run in one direction and never backwards. He found an early inspiration in the philosopher Henri Bergson’s idea that time means invention and the creation of new forms.
This was not a fashionable interest. Most physicists and chemists of the day treated irreversible processes as a nuisance, transient effects that merely lowered the efficiency of machines or spoiled the growth of crystals, and they focused on equilibrium, the final state where all change has stopped. Prigogine later recalled a distinguished specialist telling him at a 1946 meeting in Brussels that he was surprised anyone would study such transitory phenomena rather than equilibrium itself. Prigogine took the opposite view. He saw irreversible processes as constructive, the source of the organization visible in every living thing.
Teaching in secret under occupation
Prigogine began his research career under the German occupation of Belgium. From 1940 he gave clandestine lectures to students, and when the university closed itself in 1941 in protest at the occupiers’ attempt to impose pro-Nazi professors, he went on teaching in secret until the liberation in 1944. During those years he still published twenty-one scientific papers.
In 1943 he and the poet Hélène Jofé, who became his first wife, were arrested by the Germans. After several people intervened on their behalf, among them Belgium’s Queen Elisabeth, they were released a couple of weeks later. For a Jewish refugee family that had already fled two countries, the danger was very real.
Order out of disorder
Classical thermodynamics, built in the nineteenth century to understand steam engines, deals mainly with systems at equilibrium, where nothing changes, and it is famous for the second law: left alone, things run down, and disorder, measured as entropy, increases. Yet living things are highly organized and stay that way, and nature is full of patterns that seem to appear spontaneously. How could order arise in a universe that tends toward disorder?
Prigogine spent decades on that question. In 1945 he proved a theorem about systems held slightly away from equilibrium, showing that they settle into steady states in which entropy is produced as slowly as possible. But he knew that this applied only close to equilibrium. Working for some twenty years, from 1947 to 1967, with his colleague Paul Glansdorff and later with younger collaborators including René Lefever and Grégoire Nicolis, he found what happens when systems are pushed far from equilibrium by a steady flow of energy and matter. Past a critical point, they can become unstable and spontaneously form new, ordered structures. He called them dissipative structures, because they exist only while they keep consuming energy from their surroundings and giving off heat.
A classic example, cited by the Swedish Academy, is a thin layer of liquid heated from below. At a certain temperature it organizes itself into neat hexagonal convection cells, which vanish as soon as the heat is turned off. With Lefever and Nicolis, Prigogine built a simple model of chemical reactions, later nicknamed the Brusselator, that showed how reactions combined with diffusion can produce oscillations and patterns, echoing ideas the mathematician Alan Turing had proposed about how patterns form in living organisms. The Academy summed up the achievement in 1977: he had shown that it is possible to create order from disorder.
Where the ideas are used today
Prigogine’s work gave scientists a language for self-organization, the way complex, ordered behaviour emerges from many simple interactions in systems that are constantly fed with energy. Living cells are the prime example: they keep their organization only by taking in nutrients and giving off heat and waste. His framework is used to think about chemical clocks and oscillating reactions, the formation of patterns in developing embryos, the behaviour of chemical reactors, and the dynamics of ecosystems and climate. The Swedish Academy noted that in the years before his prize the theory was already being applied mainly in biology, and that it had also been used to describe phenomena in social systems.
He also turned his methods to everyday problems. With Robert Herman he developed a kinetic theory of vehicle traffic, treating cars a little like molecules in a gas, which became one of the foundations of traffic engineering models for city road networks. More broadly, his insistence that instability, fluctuation and the arrow of time are central to nature helped inspire the modern study of complex systems, a field that today ranges from physics and chemistry to economics and the design of networks.
Brussels, Austin and the Solvay Institutes
Prigogine became a full professor at the Free University of Brussels in 1951, at 34 the youngest in the history of its science faculty. In 1959 he was appointed director of the International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry in Brussels, the body that had hosted the famous Solvay conferences attended by Einstein, Bohr and Curie. From the same period he also taught in the United States, and in 1967 he co-founded a centre for statistical mechanics and thermodynamics at the University of Texas at Austin, which was later named after him. He divided his time between Brussels and Austin for decades.
He wrote some twenty books, including widely read works for general readers written with the philosopher Isabelle Stengers, such as Order Out of Chaos and The End of Certainty, in which he argued that instability and chance make the future genuinely open rather than fixed in advance. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977, for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics and particularly the theory of dissipative structures, and was given 53 honorary degrees. In 1989 King Baudouin made him a viscount.
A quiet Jewish identity
Prigogine was born into a Jewish family and lived through the upheavals that shaped so many Jewish lives in the twentieth century: revolution in Russia, exile in Weimar Germany, a move to Belgium as Nazism spread, and arrest during the occupation. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, he rarely referred publicly to being Jewish, and Belgium’s central Jewish organization described him as fairly low-profile about his Jewishness. A 1980 profile described the family’s move from Berlin to Brussels as an escape from the rising tide of Nazism.
He was a humanist rather than a religious man, and in 2003 he was among the Nobel laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto. His scientific outlook, that time creates and that the future is not determined, was also, for him, a hopeful view of human freedom.
Family and final years
Prigogine and Hélène Jofé had a son, Yves, in 1945; the marriage ended in divorce. In 1961 he married the Polish-born chemist Maria Prokopowicz, and their son Pascal was born in 1970. In his later decades he turned to the deepest version of his old question, trying with his co-workers to build the arrow of time into the basic equations of classical and quantum physics. These proposals remain debated, but they showed the same willingness to challenge settled views that had produced his best work. He remained active into old age, presiding over an international academy of science and helping found an international body for accrediting distance education in 1997.
Ilya Prigogine died on May 28, 2003, at the age of 86. Science still uses his concepts every day, often without naming him: whenever researchers explain how a living cell, a chemical reaction or a city’s traffic organizes itself while energy flows through it, they are working in the territory he mapped. He is remembered in Brussels and Austin alike as a teacher who gathered gifted young scientists around him and gave them hard questions.
Sources & further reading
Ilya Prigogine, Biographical (autobiography), NobelPrize.org · Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1977, NobelPrize.org · Ilya Prigogine, Jewish Virtual Library · Ilya Prigogine, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.