Ilya Prigogine

Ilya Prigogine was a chemist and physicist. He made enormous advances in the field of thermodynamics, historically the study of the behaviour of energy, heat and work in physical systems. His theory of dissipative structures, which describes the self-organising activity of systems ‘far from equilibrium’, has been foundational in complexity theory. He both drew upon systems theory and advanced it in important ways, particularly regarding systems in the physical world. His ideas have also been applied to human systems in several disciplines. McMillan (2004, p. 27) describes his work as follows: “Instead of a world where systems ran down and were subject to an ongoing deterioration, he showed that systems were essentially non-linear, dynamic and able to transform themselves into new states of being.”