Ilya Prigogine

Fleeing the Bolshevik regime as a child, Prigogine settled in Brussels in 1929, studying chemistry and physics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), where he became professor in 1950. He also directed the Center for Statistical Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin.

Prigogine demonstrated that open systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium can spontaneously generate order, complexity, and self-organization—structures he named 'dissipative structures' (such as the Bénard cell and chemical clocks). His works Order out of Chaos explored the irreversible 'arrow of time'.