12 January] 1917 – 28 May 2003) was a Belgian physical chemist of Russian-Jewish origin, noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility.

In 1921, the factory having been nationalized by the new Soviet regime and the feeling of insecurity rising amidst the civil war, the family left Russia.

After a brief period in Lithuania, they went to Germany and settled in Berlin; 8 years later, due to the poor economic situation and the creeping emergence of Nazism, they moved on to Brussels, where Prigogine received Belgian nationality in 1949.

In 1941, the university formally closed to protest the forced appointment of Flemish pro-Nazi New Order professors by the occupiers;[11] he continued giving clandestine lectures until the Liberation of Belgium in 1944.

In 1943, Prigogine and his future wife Hélène Jofé were arrested by the Germans; after multiple interventions including by the Queen Elisabeth, they were eventually released a couple of weeks later.

[19] Prigogine defined dissipative structures and their role in thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium,[1][2][5] a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977.

[24] Dissipative structure theory led to pioneering research in self-organizing systems, as well as philosophical inquiries into the formation of complexity in biological entities and the quest for a creative and irreversible role of time in the natural sciences.

[21][30] In his later years, his work concentrated on the fundamental role of indeterminism in nonlinear systems on both the classical and quantum level.

[32] Prigogine co-authored several books with Isabelle Stengers, including The End of Certainty and La Nouvelle Alliance (Order out of Chaos).

This is a major departure from the approach of Newton, Einstein and Schrödinger, all of whom expressed their theories in terms of deterministic equations.

With no arrow of time, there is no longer a privileged moment known as the "present," which follows a determined "past" and precedes an undetermined "future."

Prigogine notes numerous examples of irreversibility, including diffusion, radioactive decay, solar radiation, weather and the emergence and evolution of life.

Prigogine asserts that Newtonian physics has now been "extended" three times:[citation needed] first with the introduction of spacetime in general relativity, then with the use of the wave function in quantum mechanics, and finally with the recognition of indeterminism in the study of unstable systems (chaos theory).