Milivoje Kostic was born and raised in Serbia. He completed his "Dipl-Ing" degree in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Belgrade in 1975, with the distinction of having the highest GPA in the mechanical engineering program history at the time. Then he worked as a researcher in thermal engineering and combustion at Vinca Institute for Nuclear Sciences, which then hosted the headquarters of the International Center for Heat and Mass Transfer, and later taught at the University of Belgrade. In meantime, he spent three summers as an exchange visitor in England, West Germany, and the former Soviet Union. Kostic came to the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1981 as a Fulbright grantee, where he received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering in 1984. He subsequently worked several years in industry before emigrated to the United States in 1986. After working for 26 years at Northern Illinois University, he retired in 2014 to focus on his fundamental research, and became Professor Emeritus in 2015. Kostic was appointed the Editor-in-Chief of the Thermodynamics Section of Entropy journal, after serving as a Guest Editor of two special issues on Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Professional work
Kostic has also worked in industry and has authored a number of patents and professional publications, including invited articles in professional encyclopedias. Professor Kostic was appointed as NASA faculty fellow, and Fermi and Argonne National Laboratories faculty researcher. He has a number of professional awards and recognitions, is a frequent keynote plenary speaker at international conferences and at different educational and public institutions, as well as member of several professional societies and scientific advisory boards. Kostic is interested in the fundamental laws of nature, thermodynamics and heat transfer fundamentals and applications, and especially the Second law of thermodynamics and entropy., see also . He has developed a collaboration with Tsinghua and other Chinese universities. Kostic wrote about Entransy concept and controversies , and is editing an , as well as a Topical collection, . More recently Kostic has raised some critical issues regarding the challenges of the Second Law of thermodynamics, including a number of puzzling issues still surrounding thermodynamics and the nature of heat, epitomized by the elusive Maxwell's demon. Namely, he argued that Maxwell and his followers focused on 'effortless gating' a molecule at a time, but overlooked simultaneous interference of other chaotic molecules, while the demon exorcists tried to justify impossible processes with misplaced 'compensations' by work of measurements and gate operation, and information storage and memory erasure with entropy generation.. Some other unjustified claims, fundamentally misplaced and dramatized, like “heat flowing from cold to hot without external intervention,” have been critically analyzed and demystified by Kostic.
