Ilya Prigogine

Mike's Notes

I came across Ilya Prigogine around 2016 when I was beginning to learn about the behaviour of complex systems.

"Viscount Ilya Romanovich Prigogine; 25 January [O.S. 12 January] 1917 – 28 May 2003) was a Belgian physical chemist of Russian-Jewish origin, noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility.

Prigogine's work most notably earned him the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, as well as the Francqui Prize in 1955 and the Rumford Medal in 1976." - Wikipedia

Resources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabelle_Stengers
• https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/0684837056
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipative_system
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belousov%E2%80%93Zhabotinsky_reaction

Ilya Prigogine

Wikipedia:

Prigogine defined dissipative structures and their role in thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium, a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. In summary, Ilya Prigogine discovered that importation and dissipation of energy into chemical systems could result in the emergence of new structures (hence dissipative structures) due to internal self reorganization.[ In his 1955 text, Prigogine drew connections between dissipative structures and the Rayleigh-Bénard instability and the Turing mechanism.

Dissipative structures theory

Dissipative structure theory led to pioneering research in self-organizing systems, as well as philosophical inquiries into the formation of complexity in biological entities and the quest for a creative and irreversible role of time in the natural sciences.

With professor Robert Herman, he also developed the basis of the two fluid model, a traffic model in traffic engineering for urban networks, analogous to the two fluid model in classical statistical mechanics.

Prigogine's formal concept of self-organization was used also as a "complementary bridge" between general systems theory and thermodynamics, conciliating the cloudiness of some important systems theory concepts[which?] with scientific rigor.

Work on unsolved problems in physics

In his later years, his work concentrated on the fundamental role of indeterminism in nonlinear systems on both the classical and quantum level. Prigogine and coworkers proposed a Liouville space extension of quantum mechanics. A Liouville space is the vector space formed by the set of (self-adjoint) linear operators, equipped with an inner product, that act on a Hilbert space.[There exists a mapping of each linear operator into Liouville space, yet not every self-adjoint operator of Liouville space has a counterpart in Hilbert space, and in this sense Liouville space has a richer structure than Hilbert space.The Liouville space extension proposal by Prigogine and co-workers aimed to solve the arrow of time problem of thermodynamics and the measurement problem of quantum mechanics.

Prigogine co-authored several books with Isabelle Stengers, including The End of Certainty and La Nouvelle Alliance (Order out of Chaos).

The End of Certainty | Interview with Ilya Prigogine (1997)

YouTube: 1997

Lecture by Ilya Prigogine (Chemistry '77) – Time, Dynamics, and Chaos: Integrating Poincaré’s “Non-Integrable Systems”

Nobel Conference XXVI at Gustavus Adolphus College: October 2 and 3, 1990

YouTube: 

Publications (from Wikipedia)

• Prigogine, I.; Defay, R. (1954). Chemical Thermodynamics. London: Longmans Green and Co.
• Prigogine, I. (1955). Introduction to Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes. Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas Publisher.
• Prigogine, Ilya (1957). The Molecular Theory of Solutions. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company.
• Prigogine, Ilya (1961). Introduction to Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes (Second ed.). New York: Interscience. OCLC 219682909.
• Prigogine, Ilya (1962). Non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. Monographs in Statistical Physics and Thermodynamics, Vol. I. Interscience Publishers.[20] 2017 reprint. Courier Dover Publications. 27 February 2017. ISBN 978-0-486-82040-8.
• Defay, R. & Prigogine, I. (1966). Surface tension and adsorption. Longmans, Green & Co. LTD.
• Glansdorff, Paul; Prigogine, I. (1971). Thermodynamics Theory of Structure, Stability and Fluctuations. London: Wiley-Interscience.
• Prigogine, Ilya; Herman, R. (1971). Kinetic Theory of Vehicular Traffic. New York: American Elsevier. ISBN 0-444-00082-8.
• Prigogine, Ilya; Nicolis, G. (1977). Self-Organization in Non-Equilibrium Systems. Wiley. ISBN 0-471-02401-5.
• Prigogine, Ilya (1980). From Being To Becoming. Freeman. ISBN 0-7167-1107-9.[21]
• Prigogine, Ilya; Stengers, Isabelle (1984). Order out of Chaos: Man's new dialogue with nature. Flamingo. ISBN 0-00-654115-1. 2018 edition. Verso Books. 23 January 2018. ISBN 978-1-78663-100-8.
• Prigogine, I. The Behavior of Matter under Nonequilibrium Conditions: Fundamental Aspects and Applications in Energy-oriented Problems, United States Department of Energy, Progress Reports:
• September 1984 – November 1987, (7 October 1987). Department of Physics at the University of Texas-Austin
• 15 April 1988 – 14 April 1989, (January 1989), Center for Studies in Statistical Mathematics at the University of Texas-Austin.
• 15 April 1990 – 14 April 1991, (December 1990), Center for Studies in Statistical Mechanics and Complex Systems at the University of Texas-Austin.
• Nicolis, G.; Prigogine, I. (1989). Exploring complexity: An introduction. New York, NY: W. H. Freeman. ISBN 0-7167-1859-6.[22]
• Prigogine, I. "Time, Dynamics and Chaos: Integrating Poincare's 'Non-Integrable Systems'", Center for Studies in Statistical Mechanics and Complex Systems at the University of Texas-Austin, United States Department of Energy-Office of Energy Research, Commission of the European Communities (October 1990).
• Prigogine, Ilya (1993). Chaotic Dynamics and Transport in Fluids and Plasmas: Research Trends in Physics Series. New York: American Institute of Physics. ISBN 0-88318-923-2.
• Prigogine, Ilya; Stengers, Isabelle (1997). The End of Certainty. The Free Press. ISBN 978-0-684-83705-5.
• Kondepudi, Dilip; Prigogine, Ilya (1998). Modern Thermodynamics: From Heat Engines to Dissipative Structures. Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-97394-2. Kondepudi, Dilip; Prigogine, Ilya (31 December 2014). 2014 edition. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-118-37181-7.
• Prigogine, Ilya (2002). Advances in Chemical Physics. New York: Wiley InterScience. ISBN 978-0-471-26431-6. Archived from the original on 17 December 2012. Retrieved 29 July 2008.
• Editor (with Stuart A. Rice) of the Advances in Chemical Physics book series published by John Wiley & Sons (presently over 140 volumes)
• Prigogine I, (papers and interviews) Is future given?, World Scientific, 2003. ISBN 9789812385086 (145p.)