Pierre-Gilles de Gennes

Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
Born	(1932-10-24)October 24, 1932 Paris, France
Died	Orsay, France
Nationality	French
Fields	Physics
Institutions	ESPCI Collège de France Paris-Sud 11 University Orsay
Alma mater	École Normale Supérieure
Notable awards	ForMemRS (1984) Matteucci Medal (1987) Harvey Prize (1988) Lorentz Medal (1990) Wolf Prize (1990) Nobel Prize for Physics (1991) Eringen Medal (1998)

Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (French: [ʒɛn]; October 24, 1932 – May 18, 2007) was a French physicist and the Nobel Prize laureate in physics in 1991.

Education and early life

He was born in Paris, France, and was home-schooled to the age of 12. By the age of 13, he had adopted adult reading habits and was visiting museums. Later, de Gennes studied at the École Normale Supérieure. After leaving the École in 1955, he became a research engineer at the Saclay center of the Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique, working mainly on neutron scattering and magnetism, with advice from A. Abragam and Jacques Friedel. He defended his Ph.D. in 1957.

Career and research

In 1959, he was a postdoctoral research visitor with Charles Kittel at the University of California, Berkeley, and then spent 27 months in the French Navy. In 1961, he was assistant professor in Orsay and soon started the Orsay group on superconductors. In 1968, he switched to studying liquid crystals.

In 1971, he became professor at the Collège de France, and participated in STRASACOL (a joint action of Strasbourg, Saclay and Collège de France) on polymer physics. From 1980 on, he became interested in interfacial problems : the dynamics of wetting and adhesion.

More recently, he worked on granular materials and on the nature of memory objects in the brain.

Awards and honours

He was awarded the Harvey Prize, Lorentz Medal and Wolf Prize in 1988 and 1990. In 1991, he received the Nobel Prize in physics. He was then director of the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris (ESPCI), a post he held from 1976 until his retirement in 2002.

P.G. de Gennes has also received the F.A. Cotton Medal for Excellence in Chemical Research of the American Chemical Society in 1997, the Holweck Prize from the joint French and British Physical Society; the Ampere Prize, French Academy of Science; the gold medal from the French CNRS; the Matteuci Medal, Italian Academy; the Harvey Prize, Israel; and polymer awards from both APS and ACS.

He was awarded a Nobel Prize for discovering that "methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to more complex forms of matter, in particular to liquid crystals and polymers".

The Royal Society of Chemistry awards the De Gennes Prize biennially, in his honour. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1984. He was awarded A. Cemal Eringen Medal in 1998.

Personal life

In 2003 he was one of 22 Nobel Laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.

On 22 May 2007, his death was made public as official messages and tributes poured in.