Monday, October 9, 2006
"The Nature of Memory Objects"

When French scientist Pierre-Gilles de Gennes was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work defining general rules to explain the behavior of liquid crystal molecules, the judges lauded him as “the Isaac Newton of our time.” His simplification of the understanding of liquid crystals led also to his discovery of similar rules for polymers and superconductors.

Educated at the École Normale Supérieure and the University of California at Berkeley, de Gennes has been a professor at the Collège de France since 1971 and was the director of the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles in Paris from 1976 until his retirement in 2002. Since the 1980s, de Gennes has researched the dynamics of wetting and adhesion, including biological applications. His most recent work has focused on the study of granular materials and the nature of memory objects in brain function.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, de Gennes received the Gold Medal in 1980 from France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and numerous other awards from scientific organizations around the world. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, as well as similar groups in Holland, the United States, Australia, the Ukraine, Brazil, and Russia.

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