Pierre-Gilles de Gennes was a French physicist and the Nobel Prize laureate in physics in 1991. The Nobel Prize in Physics 1991, announced October 16, 1991. Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, “for discovering that 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”. Pierre-Gilles de Gennes: born 1932, Paris, France. Wiki link Data: the Nobel Foundation (CC0).