A physicist who studied in California, de Gennes returned to his native France to work. One of his many interests was liquid crystals, which were discovered in the 19th century, but no one really understood how they worked.
They did after de Gennes was done: his 1974 The Physics of Liquid Crystals * is still the gold standard text, and his work enabled cheap liquid crystal displays on everything from calculators to cell phones to computer monitors. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1991, as well as the Wolf Prize in 1990. The Nobel board dubbed him the “Isaac Newton of our time” — which de Gennes rejected as “Nordic lyricism” (Newton was English). He died May 18 in Orsay. He was 74.