Pierre-Gilles de Gennes is a French physicist whose work has been fundamental in understanding how molecules arrange and order themselves in complex systems.

The son of a physician, de Gennes studied at the École Normale Supérieure. In 1958 he earned his Ph.D. in physics while working for the Center for Atomic Studies in Saclay, France, part of the French Atomic Energy Commission. After a postdoctoral appointment at the University of California at Berkeley in 1959, where he worked with the solid-state physicist Charles Kittel, de Gennes returned to France to spend 27 months in the French Navy, then became a professor of physics at the Université du Paris Sud in Orsay. De Gennes worked on properties of superconductors for several years, predicting several new properties that were verified by experiment.

In 1968 de Gennes began to study liquid crystals, liquids whose molecules tend to order themselves, like...