ABSTRACT
Ilya Prigogine and Interdisciplinary Science Ilya Prigogine must always have had his eye out for kindred spirits, individuals who loved science-all science-and who were contributing to some science in particular. That may be why he appeared so often at multidisciplinary conferences and why he sponsored so many such events himself. I fi rst met him at one such conference, one devoted to nonlinear dynamics sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation under the leadership of Robert Crosby. That institution’s immediate concern was the growth of cities and the complex, developing transportation networks that cities require. Crosby had already contracted with Ilya’s Solvay Institute to study the phenomenon. Bob’s conference brought mathematicians, physicists, and regional scientists together to consider the methodological problems involved, to inform one another of the various approaches being taken already, or that seemed to have potential, and to expose commonalities among them: nonlinearities of causal structure and complex patterns of system development over time and space (see [4]).
