Ilya Prigogine was a Russian-born Belgian thermodynamicist who was awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for contributions to understanding the thermodynamics of systems which are not in equilibrium states. A focus of Prigogine's work was the role of time in the physical sciences and in biology. He attempted to reconcile a tendency in nature for disorder to increase, as described in the second law of thermodynamics, with self-organization, a countervailing tendency for order to arise from disorder.