Isabelle Stengers is a professor of philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Trained as a chemist and philosopher, her publications include Cosmopolitics, a comprehensive reconsideration of the entire history of modern science from Galileo to contemporary complexity theory. She received the grand prize for philosophy from the Acadé mie Franç aise in 1993.
Viscount Ilya Romanovich Prigogine was a Belgian physical chemist noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems and irreversibility. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1977.