Ilya Prigogine was born in Tsarist Russia, lived in Germany, and later became a citizen of Belgium. However, the results of his scientific research belong to the whole world. Representatives of various sciences refer to Prigozhin's works: elements of nonequilibrium dynamics are reflected in the natural and humanitarian disciplines.
From the biography of Ilya Romanovich Prigozhin
The future creator of nonequilibrium thermodynamics was born on January 25, 1917 in Moscow. He became the second son of a wealthy Jewish manufacturer. Prigozhin's father at one time graduated from the chemical department of the Moscow Technical School. In 1913 he organized a paint and varnish production. My grandfather was a jeweler and watchmaker. Ilya's mother was a pianist, she studied at the Moscow Conservatory. Prigozhin's elder brother, Alexander, became a famous ornithologist in the country, for many years he studied the birds of the Belgian Congo.
In 1921, the Prigozhin family left Soviet Russia. First, they moved to the Lithuanian Kaunas, then to Berlin, where their father's brother lived. In the late 1920s, anti-Semitic sentiments intensified in Germany, so the Prigozhins chose Belgium as their place of residence. Here Ilya Romanovich (Ruvimovich) graduated from the University of Brussels in 1942.
Ilya Prigozhin's scientific career and his achievements
The biography of Ilya Prigozhin is inseparable from his scientific research. From the beginning of the 40s, the Belgian scientist became interested in the problems of nonequilibrium dynamics. He established in the course of his research that the processes that take place in systems that are far from equilibrium are capable of transforming into spatial and temporal structures. In this case, the system becomes sensitive to random deviations. Such fluctuations may well become a factor guiding the development of the system.
The scientist paid the main attention to the study of dissipative structures. Together with a group of other employees, Ilya Romanovich developed a relatively simple theoretical model that described the phenomenon of self-organization of systems.
The study of the patterns of development of open systems and their spontaneous self-organization led Prigogine to the creation of the famous theory of dissipative structures. In Russia, this area of interdisciplinary research is called synergetics.
Contribution to science
Ilya Prigogine is a versatile scientist who was able to think in universal categories. He made a successful attempt to establish a connection between the natural sciences and the humanities. The scientist moved from a model of complex chemical processes to generalizations of the world. Prigogine's works determined the further direction of the development of the scientific paradigm.
Prigogine's evolutionary concept covers chemistry, biology and part of the social sciences. In this paradigm, there was a place for the idea of irreversibility and internal randomness. The Belgian scientist paid much attention to the consideration of the problems associated with time and its nature.
Prigogine managed to prove one of the main theorems of thermodynamics of nonequilibrium processes - about entropy in an open system.
Belgian scientist - 1977 Nobel laureate. In the early 1980s, Ilya Prigozhin was elected a foreign member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1989, Ilya Romanovich became a viscount - this title was bestowed on the scientist by the King of Belgium.
The scientist's works have been repeatedly translated into Russian.
Personal life of Ilya Prigozhin
Prigogine was married twice. His first wife was Helen Yofe, a poet. In this marriage, the couple had a son, Eve, who became an anthropologist in 1945. The second wife of the scientist is Marina Prokopovich. Prigogine's youngest son, Pascal, was born in 1970.
Ilya Prigogine passed away on May 28, 2003 at the age of 86.
