In 1977, Ilya Prigogine from the University of Texas at Austin was awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize “for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures.”

The great contribution of Prigogine to thermodynamic theory in his successful extension of it to systems which are far from thermodynamic equilibrium. The description of these structures have led to many fundamental discoveries and applications in diverse fields of human endeavour, not only in chemistry.

In the last few years applications in biology have been dominating but the theory of dissipative structures has also been used to describe phenomena in social-systems.