P. Glansdorff, I. Prigogine (1971), London and New York: Wiley-Interscience (xxiii, 306 pp.; LCCN 78147070; OCLC 165125); French edition Structure, stabilité et fluctuations, Paris: Masson, 1971 — https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/165125
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, as one of the works filling out the record’s coverage of Prigogine’s dissipative-structure programme.
Unavailable because no lawful full text was reachable, so it is not read and
no NOTE is filed. No table of contents was found either. What follows is
only what the catalogue records show and what two read works say about the
book; it is not a reading.
What read works cite from it.
- The Nobel lecture (LIT-516) cites it for the assumption of local equilibrium (“Chapter II, p. 14”), for δ²S as a Lyapounov function near equilibrium “independently of the boundary conditions” (ch. V), for the explicit form of δ²S (p. 25), and for the excess entropy production ½∂δ²S/∂t = ΣδJδX and its extension to convection (ch. VII).
- Cross and Hohenberg (LIT-527, §XIII.B) quote the book (p. 108) as stating that “the search for a universal kinetic potential has proved to be unsuccessful”. They add that it proposes “more specialized variational principles, as well as a ‘universal evolution criterion’ in the form of an inequality involving generalized thermodynamic forces”.
That quotation matters for the record’s coverage of entropy-production principles. On the reports of two read works, the book’s own authors did not claim a general extremum principle for steady states far from equilibrium. A deeper reading should check that statement in context, and the exact form and scope of the “universal evolution criterion”.
Priority for a deeper reading: medium. It is the primary technical source of the stability theory, but the lecture states its main results with the scope limits that matter here, and the book is not reachable.