Prigogine, Ilya Nobel Prize awarded

The supreme crowning of this intense activity was, in 1977, the award of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Ilya Prigogine, for his works in thermodynamics. 

In 1977. Professor Ilya Prigogine of the Free University of Brussels. Belgium, was awarded Ihe Nobel Prize in chemistry for his central role in the advances made in irreversible thermodynamics over the last ihrec decades. Prigogine and his associates investigated Ihe properties of systems far from equilibrium where a variety of phenomena exist that are not possible near or al equilibrium. These include chemical systems with multiple stationary states, chemical hysteresis, nucleation processes which give rise to transitions between multiple stationary states, oscillatory systems, the formation of stable and oscillatory macroscopic spatial structures, chemical waves, and Lhe critical behavior of fluctuations. As pointed out by I. Procaccia and J. Ross (Science. 198, 716—717, 1977). the central question concerns Ihe conditions of instability of the thermodynamic branch. The theory of stability of ordinary differential equations is well established. The problem that confronted Prigogine and his collaborators was to develop a thermodynamic theory of stability that spans the whole range of equilibrium and nonequilibrium phenomena. 

These structures have been called dissipative structures by Ilya Prigogine, who gave the first general thermodynamic description of these phenomena (1, 2). He has been awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that work. 

While Belousov was describing his e)q)eriments into oscillatory chemical reactions, Ilya Prigogine in Brussels was developing theoretical models of nonequilibrium thermodynamics and ended with the notion of "structure dissipative" for which he was awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The concept of "Dissipative Structure" is ejq)licitly mentioned in the Nobel quotation "The 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Professor Ilya Prigogine, Brussels, for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures". In the first half of the 1950s, Glansdorff and Balescu defined with Prigogine the thermodynamic criteria necessary for oscillatory behavior in dissipative systems [7]. Nicohs and Lefever then applied these to models of autocatalytic reactions [8]. 

In our opinion these are self-organising systems that spontaneously form dissipative structures above certain characteristic volume concentrations. Such structures form in non-isolated systems far removed from thermodynamic equilibrium, where the determining variables satisfy non-linear dynamic laws. (For his pioneering work in this field the Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine was awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1977.) Furthermore, the conductivity of the polymers that form the structures can in our opinion be explained better by the assumption that freely mobile electrons are present within particle structures only a few nanometres in size. 

In 1977, Nicolis and Prigogine summarized the work of the Brussels school in a book entitled Self-Organization in Nonequilihrium Systems. For his contributions to the study of nonequilibrium systems, Ilya Prigogine was awarded the 1977 Nobel prize in chemistry. 

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See also in sourсe #XX -- [ ]

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