This life is not to be enclosed between birth and death. Ilya Prigogine used to say he intended to live in the future. This statement, if we are to take it at face value, makes sense in the rewriting of his biography. Ilya Romanovitch Prigogine was born in Moscow in 1917. His father, the late Roman Prigogine, was an engineer from the Moscow Polytechnic. He was also a collector of Russian coins. His mother, Julia Wichman, helped young Ilya read musical scores before he could read printed works. Ilya Prigogine was awarded a Ph.D. in chemistry at Brussel’s Universite Libre, a free-thinking institution. A member of the Jewish community, he began to give public lessons only in 1945. From the innovative work of Theophile De Donder, Prigogine was to make remarkable contributions to thermodynamics, the molecular theory of solutions and problems in fundamental physics and chemistry. Prigogine’s most acclaimed work was a definitive contribution to the theory of organized states in open systems under far-from-equilibrium conditions—the now famous “dissipative structures,” a formulation he consecrated in the 1960s. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. However this was only the beginning of an exciting adventure, as he felt more free to open new paths in some promising frontiers of interdisciplinary interest, including transportation science, in addition to fundamental physics. In transportation science, Prigogine collaborated with the late Robert Herman to make a profound impact through his development of a kinetic theory of traffic flow that resulted in the seminal monograph Kinetic Theory of Vehicular Traffic. This theory describes vehicular traffic with a set of ordinary differential equations originally developed in statistical mechanics. The unknown function is f x v t , the distribution of vehicles at location x and time t. The equations are adapted from Boltzmann’s theory for rarefied gas dynamics. Prigogine and Herman also developed the two-fluid model of town traffic, loosely based on the kinetic theory, as one of very few approaches to the characterization of traffic flow at the network level. The two-fluid theory was validated empirically in several cities, including Brussels. The kinetic theory of traffic flow, after more than 30 years, still represents one of the three main approaches to modeling traffic; the other two consist of the microscopic or car-following models, and the macroscopic or fluid dynamic approach (based on partial differential equations). The cellular automata models are also inspired from gas dynamics and used in large-scale simulation models. The kinetic theory, which provides intermediary modeling tools between microscopic and macroscopic approaches, is still at the root of numerous recent developments in traffic flow. Prigogine led an ongoing, stubborn attempt to design new tools for the description of elementary interactions, taking into account statistical, collective, and irreversible features. This bold attempt covers statistical mechanics, cosmology, and quantum mechanics. Prigogine the man had a spirit of bold openness. His pupils will never be followers.