Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (1932–2007)

Abstract

Notes

1. There is a (perhaps apocryphal) story of de Gennes arriving in Rome to give a talk, and offering to give it in English, French, or Italian. The audience chose English. de Gennes was subsequently questioned by a fellow conferee as to his competence in Italian. He admitted that his Italian was insufficient to sustain the conference talk, but that good manners required him to offer nevertheless.

2. The flow-order parameter relaxation coupling, pioneered in an earlier paper in collaboration with Parodi and Dubois-Violette, is an alternative way of viewing the backflow of the Leslie–Ericksen theory. The opposing viewpoints led to some considerable dispute in the late 1960s and early 1970s. With the passage of time, it is interesting from the point of view of the history of science to compare the approaches of the intuitive theoretical physicist de Gennes with that of the rigorous applied mathematician Leslie. In the end it turned out that the two were more or less equivalent.

3. A list of de Gennes’ publications can be found in the preface to the J. Phys. Chem. de Gennes special issue: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/jp9011894. This list includes 609 research publications and 10 books.