Alexandre Prigogine

Alexandre Prigogine ( Russian Александр Романович Пригожин ; born April 12, 1913 in Moscow as Alexander Romanowitsch Prigozhin ; May 7, 1991 in Brussels ), was a Belgian mineralogist and ornithologist of Russian origin.

Life

Prigogine comes from a Jewish family. His father Roman (Ruwim Abramowitsch) Prigoschin was a chemical engineer, his mother Julia Leiwikowny Wichman was a pianist. His younger brother Ilya Prigogine received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977 . In 1921 the family left the Soviet Union , first living in Lithuania , from 1922 in Germany and from 1929 in Belgium . Prigogine received his doctorate in chemistry from the Université libre de Bruxelles and traveled to the Belgian Congo in 1938 as a mineral specialist . His ornithological career began with a hunting accident that damaged his right hand. During a visit to Henri Schouteden , Honorary Director of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren , Prigogine was persuaded to shoot birds with a small shotgun in order to participate in a museum project to catalog the birds of the Congo. This company was a great success as, after many years of hard work, the Tervuren bird collection was expanded by 20,000 bellows. Sutembo, Lutunguru and Kamituga, where its local collectors worked, became popular places. Other locations, including Mount Kabobo, Idjwi Island, and Marungu, were explored for the first time.

Prigogine's bibliography includes 94 ornithological works, including Les oiseaux de l'Itombwe et de son hinterland , three volumes of which were published in the Annales du Musée Royal de l'Afrique Centrale in 1971, 1978 and 1984 . He also reviewed and rated many taxa known to science by senior synonyms . Most of his earlier publications appeared in the Revue de zoologie africaine and later in Le Gerfaut , in the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club , Ibis , Bonn zoological contributions and communications from the Zoological Museum in Berlin . His first descriptions include the Albert's pygmy owl ( Glaucidium albertinum ), the Schouteden's swift ( Schoutedenapus schoutedeni ), the Itombwe flycatcher ( Muscicapa itombwensis ) and the cabbage warbler ( Apalis kaboensis ) as well as about 30 subspecies. He named the subspecies Sheppardia bocagei ilyai of the bocage chalk after his brother Ilya.

Prigogine was the first scientist to the concepts of Para species and Allospezies applied them to the Vogeltaxonomie Central Africa.

In 1985 Prigogine was elected Vice President and Director of the Scientific Committee of the 6th Pan-African Ornithological Congress.

Dedication names

After Prigogine are Kongomaskeneule ( Phodilus prigoginei , 1952 by Schouteden), the Marungunektarvogel ( Cinnyris prigoginei , 1958 by James David Macdonald ), the Prigogine-Bulbul ( Chlorocichla prigoginei , 1967 by Antoon De Roo ) and the Prigogine-nightjar ( Caprimulgus prigoginei , 1990 by Michel Louette ). Prigogine is also honored in the epithets of the subspecies Gonionotophis brussauxi prigoginei from the snake family Lamprophiidae and the subspecies Colobus angolensis prigoginei of the Angola colobus monkey .

literature

• Michel Louette: Obituary: Alexandre Prigogine (1913-1991) . In: Ibis . 134, No. 1, Jan. 1, 1992, ISSN  1474-919X , pp. 89-90. doi : 10.1111 / j.1474-919x.1992.tb07238.x .

Web links

• Biography (russian)
• Literature by and about Alexandre Prigogine in the bibliographic database WorldCat