History - Retrospective - Brussels 1989

• Host town
• List of prize winners
• Jury members

Albert Borschette Conference Centre of the European Community - Palais des Académies

The starting point of the EU Contest for Young Scientists had to be the capital of Europe. Brussels stands as a sort of micro-Europe itself, in which any language can be heard and utilised, at any moment and anywhere. Four months before the finals in October, on June 18th 1989 and for the first time ever, the citizens of Brussels elected their regional representatives directly. Brussels-Capital Region was henceforth considered an autonomous region, along with the Flemish and Walloon Regions.
The capital, if not large, is somehow a miraculous synthesis of what Europe is and what Europe is not. Home to the main EU institutions and cosmopolitan par excellence, Brussels has had the wisdom to preserve that precious, almost intangible human touch that many huge cities scarcely possess.
In addition to this, the scientific legacy of Brussels is anything but modest. A Belgian engineer called Ernest Solvay (1838-1922) is partly to blame. He commenced the tradition of the Solvay Councils, gathering together the most influential European scientists of this century: from Marie Curie to Bohr, alongside with Rutherford, Fermi, and Einstein. Solvay, a philanthropist with a keen interest in the development of science, organised the first meetings in his own Brussels country house. Little he knew about the future impact of his initiative. In October 1933, the 7th Solvay Physics Council would have Max Born say things like "physics, as we know it, will be over in six months". Virtually all of particle physics followed this meeting.

Brussels was the birthplace of Pierre Verhulst. He would be appointed professor of mathematics at the Université Libre of Brussels and in 1846 he would show that forces which tend to prevent a population growth increase in proportion to the ratio of the excess population to the total population. The non-linear differential equation describing the growth of a biological population, which he deduced and studied, is now named after him. Based on his theory, Verhulst predicted the upper limit of the Belgium population would be 9,400,000. In fact the population in 1999 is 10,182,034.

As to more recent personalities, it is worth mentioning that Illya Prigogine, who is still working for the Université Libre de Bruxelles, won the 1977 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics.
Brussels is not only about art nouveau and La Grand Place, after all.

PRIZE WINNERS

5.000 ECU STUDY GRANTS TO

3.000 ECU STUDY GRANTS TO

THIRD PRIZES - TOOLS OF STUDY GRANTS OF 150 ECU

JURY MEMBERS

Peter Swinnerton-Dyer
Thor Bak § Luiggi Dadda
J. Ferry-Borges
C. Krimbas
R. J. van Overstraeten
Fritz Paschke
P. Pascual § Mireille Polvé
Werner Rathmayer
Pierce Ryan
Hendrik de Waard