Ilya Prigogine, the Belgian chemical physicist, was born in 1917 and initiated the application of thermodynamics to irreversible processes. He discovered that, contrary to the second law of thermodynamics, there are reactions in biochemistry (formation of amino acids from "primordial soup") and other systems that increase in complexity rather than decrease. Such systems are maintained at the cost of energy and are called "dissipative" structures, the latter providing a theoretical framework for the origin of life.
Prigogine was awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize for chemistry for this work.