Théophile de Donder

Théophile Ernest de Donder (August 19, 1872 – May 11, 1957) was a Belgian mathematician and physicist famous for his 1923 work in developing correlations between the Newtonian concept of chemical affinity and the Gibbsian concept of free energy.

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 * Mathematical physics represents the purest image that the view of nature may generate in the human mind; this image presents all the character of the product of art; it begets some unity, it is true and has the quality of sublimity; this image is to physical nature what music is to the thousand noises of which the air is full...
 * as quoted by Ilya Prigogine in his Autobiography given at the occasion of Prigogine's 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.