
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
Wolf Prize Laureate in Physics 1990

The Physics Prize Committee has unanimously selected the following two candidates to equally share the Wolf Prize for 1990: David J. Thouless and Pierre-Gilles de Gennes.
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
College de France
Paris, France
“for a wide variety of pioneering contributions to our understanding of the organization of complex condensed matter systems, de Gennes especially for his work on macromolecular matter and liquid crystals and Thouless for his on disordered and low-dimensional systems.”
Among his important contributions to many different parts of condensed matter physics, including magnetism, superconductivity and scattering studies, Professor Pierre-Gilles de Gennes has provided fundamental concepts for the development of macromolecular science. These have provided a firm foundation for analyzing complicated but important processes. He analyzed the dynamics of correlated motions of polymers in their complex environment and predicted their critical phenomena by extending the use of path-integral methods, developing applications of scaling ideas and introducing the concept of reptation. This work has stimulated many experiments which have confirmed his concepts and their relevance. It has energized the whole field of the physics of long chained macromolecules, much of the new work being done by former students and young colleagues. These achievements also hold promise for future applications to biological systems.
