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Obituary: Professor Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
The news of the death of one of the most charismatic physicists of our times, Nobel Laureate P.G. de Gennes, on May 18, 2007 brought sadness to the worldwide scientific community.
P. G. de Gennes was born in Paris, France, in 1932. He received his PhD in 1957 at Saclay on magnetism and subsequent postdoctoral training with C. Kittel at the University of California, Berkeley. He then set up at Orsay an activity on superconductivity with both theory and experiment. He made seminal contributions concerning in particular surface superconductivity. He authored the classic book entitled “Superconductivity of Metals and Alloys.” In latter years, his research interests frequently shifted with time to different fields of condensed matter physics including liquid crystals, polymers, colloids, interfacial phenomena of wetting and adhesion, and most recently to granular materials and brain science. In each of these areas, he practiced the magic of pulling elegant physics from a collection of data that would appear to be incoherent. In 1968, he started his transformative work on liquid crystals. His famous analogy of the smectic-A liquid crystal with superconductors brought out the universal commonality between these diverse phenomena manifesting in chemically very different materials. After a few years, he authored another masterpiece monograph “The physics of Liquid Crystals” which shaped the future of the field of liquid crystals. Subsequently, he made critical contributions to the fields of polymers, colloids, and interfacial problems of wetting and adhesion. Particularly remarkable are his solution of the self-avoidance problem in polymers and the theory of reptation (describing the reptilian-like motion of entangled polymers). He had the uncanny ability of pulling complex physics out of simple observations and simple concepts out of a clutter of data.
P.G. de Gennes started his academic career as an assistant professor at Orsay in 1968 and became professor at the College de France in 1971. He served as the director of the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris (ESPCI) from 1976 to 2002. Well known scientists, including Pierre and Marie Curie, Georges Claude, Paul Langevin, and G. Charpak have been historically associated with this prestigious research institution.
He was a member of the French Academy of Sciences, the Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences, USA. P.G. de Gennes received multitude of prizes including the 1991 Physics Nobel Prize for
Date: June 2007
Satyendra Kumar
President, International Liquid Crystal Society
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