Pierre-Gilles de Gennes: a Nobel Prize laureate in physics

Keyword: granular materials, liquid crystal, Nobel Prize, solidlike, fluidlike
今天在一本书（The pursuit of perfect packing by T. Aste & D. Weaire, 2nd edition) 看到他已经逝世的消息，简单发文以作纪念！
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (October 24, 1932 in Paris – May 18, 2007 in Orsay) was a French physicist and the Nobel Prize laureate in physics in 1991. (From wiki)

Career

In 1971, he became professor at the Collège de France, and participated in STRASACOL (a joint action of Strasbourg, Saclay and Collège de France) on polymer physics. From 1980 on, he became interested in interfacial problems : the dynamics of wetting and adhesion.
He was awarded the Harvey Prize, Lorentz Medal and Wolf Prize in 1988 and 1990. In 1991, he received the Nobel Prize in physics. He was then director of the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris (ESPCI), a post he held from 1976 until his retirement in 2002.
P.G. de Gennes has also received the Holweck Prize from the joint French and British Physical Society; the Ampere Prize, French Academy of Science; the gold medal from the French CNRS; the Matteuci Medal, Italian Academy; the Harvey Prize, Israel; and polymer awards from both APS and ACS.
He was awarded a Nobel Prize for discovering "methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to more complex forms of matter, in particular to liquid crystals and polymers".
More recently, he worked on granular materials and on the nature of memory objects in the brain.

他写的一篇review paper
Granular matter: a tentative view
P. G. de Gennes
Colle`ge de France, Physique de la Matie` re Condense´ e, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France

Granular matter describes large collections of small grains, under conditions in which the Brownian
motion of the grains is negligible (sizes d>1 micrometer). The grains can exhibit solidlike behavior
and fluidlike behavior, but the description of these states is still controversial. The present discussion
is restricted to static problems, for which the main approach is to describe properly the initial state of
each volume element, when it was deposited from a fluid flow.