Pierre-Gilles de Gennes is dead

Pierre-Gilles de Gennes died four days ago. He was a French physicist and Nobel laureate.

From Wikipedia,

His Nobel Prize was awarded 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 polymer”

When I was a student at the INSA de Lyon, he once came (I think it was in 1997) to explain precisely what this meant:

“Bubbles!”

Yes. Pierre-Gilles de Gennes spent his time trying to understand what bubbles really were and how they were formed. He told us that it was important to know this, for example, in order to build safe factories for chemical products.

What impressed me most on that day was how passionate he was for his bubbles. And I guess he had an influence on me and that’s why I am so passionate for the things I like…

(Photo by AP Photo/Remy de la Mauviniere)

  • Share/Bookmark

About avinash

I am the Managing-Director of Knowledge Seven Ltd, provider of quality consultancy, support and training for open source software. I am also an amateur photographer and musician. I use a Google Nexus One Android smartphone, an Apple MacBook, Mac OS X, Linux and a lot of open source software. I am married to Christina and we have two wonderful kids, Kyan & Anya. In case you are wondering, Noulakaz means "our home" in my native language, créole.
This entry was posted in News, Technology. Bookmark the permalink.

5 Responses to Pierre-Gilles de Gennes is dead

  1. avinash says:

    Like programming, teaching, music, photography, blogging, etc.

    But first and foremost my family :-)

  2. Yashvin says:

    mes condoleances :)

    que son ame repose en paix

  3. selven says:

    like..?

    Lmao this is simple to know.. just wait to see when his eyes glow!

  4. by the way, I modified the wikipedia article to add the less nebulous definition of his work proof

    but those damn stuck up wikipedians reverted it. just a few simple words… yet they won’t let the old man have his bubbles. He’ll only be remembered as just another Nobel prize for some obscurely complicated stuff. In fact he won’t even be remembered because it is so obscurely complicated when put in its obscurely complicated form. Sad thing indeed…

    Wikipedia has too much power

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

CommentLuv Enabled