Ilya Prigogine was born in Moscow on January 25, 1917, a few months before the Russian Revolution. His family fled Russia soon after the Revolution and moved to Germany. When Prigogine was still a young boy his family moved again to Belgium.
Prigogine obtained an undergraduate degree and, in 1941, a doctorate from the Université Libre de Bruxelles.
Prigogine concentrated his career on better understanding the role of time's impact on biological processes. His work has contributed greatly to the understanding of irreversible processes. He was a professor of Physics and Chemical engineering at the University of Texas and the author of 20 books and roughly 1,000 research articles.
Prigogine received 53 degrees and numerous international awards and in 1977 he received the Noble Prize in chemistry for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures.
At the end of his life Prigogine was directing the International Solvay Institute for Physics and Chemistry in Brussels, Belgium. He died on May 28, 2003, in Brussels.
