Ilya Prigogine was born in Moscow, Russia, on January 25, 1917; His family left Russia soon after the Revolution, wandered around Europe, and in 1929 settled in Belgium. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977 for his contributions to the thermodynamics of imbalance, to the theory of dissipative structures. Prigogine received the decisive intellectual influence of two of his professors: Theophile de Donder, doctor of physical sciences and holder of the course of theoretical thermodynamics, and a doctorate in Chemistry and Physics by the Free University of Brussels in 1941. Jean Timmermans an experimenter interested in the applications of classical thermodynamics to liquid solutions and, more generally, to complex systems. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1976 and authored several books on scientific dissemination.