Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (born October 24, 1932 in Paris , † May 18, 2007 in Orsay ) was a French physicist who received the 1991 Nobel Prize in Physics . He researched superconductivity and soft matter .
Life
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes graduated from the École normal supérieure in 1955 . He then worked as a research engineer at the Center for Atomic Energy (Saclay) (CEA 2 ) until 1959 , where he mainly dealt with neutron scattering and magnetism . In 1957 he received his doctorate . 1959 followed a research stay with the solid-state physicist Charles Kittel at the University of California, Berkeley .
After a 27-month military service in the French Navy, he became an assistant professor in Orsay in 1961. There he initially dealt with superconductivity . Around 1968 he switched to the field of liquid crystals . In 1971 he became a professor at the Collège de France .
Act
De Gennes has received numerous awards for his work on liquid crystals and polymer physics . De Gennes was a member of the French Academy of Sciences (" Académie des sciences "), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1976), the Royal Society (since 1984), the National Academy of Sciences (since 1987) and many other scientific members Academies and learned societies, and honorary professor at the Collège de France .
In 1977 de Gennes was awarded the Prix Ampère , in 1983 the Gay-Lussac-Humboldt Prize , and in 1988 the ACS Award in Polymer Chemistry . In 1990 he received the Lorentz Medal and in 1991 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his discovery that methods for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized for more complex forms of matter, especially for liquid crystals and polymers ". A lasting merit is the formulation of rules of scale for complex systems such as polymer solutions or polymer melts , on the basis of the dimensional analysis common in engineering .
He now turned increasingly to questions of polymer physics . More recently, new areas of interest have been added, in particular interface phenomena and the dynamics of granular matter .
Fonts
- P. G. de Gennes, F. Brochard-Wyart , D. Quéré: Capillarity and Wetting Phenomena: Drops, Bubbles, Pearls, Waves. Springer, 2003, ISBN 0-387-00592-7
- P. G. de Gennes, Jacques Prost : The Physics of Liquid Crystals. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1993, ISBN 0-19-852024-7
- P. G. de Gennes: Simple Views on Condensed Matter. World Scientific Publishing Co, 1998, ISBN 981-238-282-8
- P. G. de Gennes: Scaling concepts in polymer physics. Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1979, ISBN 0-8014-1203-X
- P. G. de Gennes: Superconductivity of Metals and Alloys. W. A. Benjamin, 1964, ISBN 0-7382-0101-4
literature
- Armand Ajdari: Pierre-Gilles de Gennes ( 1932-2007 ). Obituary in: Science , Volume 317, July 27, 2007, p. 466 (in English)
Web links
- Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1991 award to Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
- Entry on Gennes, Pierre-Gilles de (1932 - 2007) in the Archives of the Royal Society , London
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Gennes, Pierre-Gilles de |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 24, 1932 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris , France |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 18, 2007 |
| Place of death | Orsay , France |