Abstract: The French Nobel prize winner in Physics in 1991, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (1932-2007), holds a position in French science that is, in many ways, unique. He presided over the creation of a new science, that of “soft matter”, a science intersecting physics, chemistry, biology, applied mathematics and engineering. This is the science of the every-day world, of materials as diverse as shaving foam, ink, sand, plastics and soap. The Nobel Prize committee called him "The Newton of our time". But he also thought about education more broadly, including the need to move away from a culture of abstract mathematics in science as well as the importance of teaching the joy of science to young people, emphasising that science is deeply human, intuitive, and driven by curiosity. Despite his fame and the accessibility of the topics he worked on, de Gennes is not widely known to the general public, a gap I would like to address.