Pierre-Gilles de Gennes

Pierre-Gilles de Gennes was a French physicist who lived from 1932 to 2007, credited with founding the field of soft matter physics through groundbreaking work on liquid crystals and polymers, including the Landau-de Gennes theory and reptation theory. After earning his doctorate in 1957, he worked at the Saclay nuclear research center and as an assistant professor at Orsay, became a professor at the College de France in 1971, and directed ESPCI Paris from 1976 until his retirement in 2002. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1991 for showing that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems could be generalized to more complex forms of matter, and was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1984. He received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1990.