RIP Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (1932-2007)

I was too focused on my book, conference, and (gasp!) social life to notice, and I completely missed the fact that Pierre-Gilles de Gennes died three weeks ago.

As the NY Times article put it, de Gennes received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1991 "for studying the boundary lines between order and disorder in materials like liquid crystals and polymers."

In fact, de Gennes was one of the giants in condensed matter physics and (unsurprisingly) a ton of his stuff influenced research in my own field of nonlinear dynamics very deeply. He was supposed to speak at a conference I attended in January 2006, but he ended up cancelling. I was really looking forward to his talk. I never had the chance to see him speak.

Here is his wikipedia entry.