Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, who directly contributed to the LCDs most of us use everyday with our laptops, has passed away.
French Nobel laureate Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, a pioneer of the liquid crystal display (LCD) that is now a standard technology in today’s consumer gadgetry, has died, his family said on Tuesday.
De Gennes, who was 74, won the 1991 Nobel Prize for Physics for groundbreaking work in liquid crystals and polymers, for which some of the judges accorded him the accolade of “the Isaac Newton of our time.” He died on Friday.
Born in Paris in 1932, de Gennes graduated from the elite Ecole Normale Superieure school, working firstly in neutron scattering and magnetism before moving to the realm of supraconductors and later to liquid crystals.