Eugene Wigner

Eugene Paul Wigner (Wigner Jenő Pál, ; November 17, 1902 – January 1, 1995) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who also contributed to mathematical physics.

Wigner Jenő Pál was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary on November 17, 1902, to middle class Jewish parents, Elisabeth Elsa Einhorn and Antal Anton Wigner, a leather tanner.

He had an older sister, Berta, known as Biri, and a younger sister Margit, known as Manci, who later married British theoretical physicist Paul Dirac.

He was home schooled by a professional teacher until the age of 9, when he started school at the third grade.

During this period, Wigner developed an interest in mathematical problems.

At the age of 11, Wigner contracted what his doctors believed to be tuberculosis.

His parents sent him to live for six weeks in a sanatorium in the Austrian mountains, before the doctors concluded that the diagnosis was mistaken.

Wigner's family was Jewish, but not religiously observant, and his Bar Mitzvah was a secular one.

From 1915 through 1919, he studied at the secondary grammar school called Fasori Evangélikus Gimnázium, the school his father had attended.

Religious education was compulsory, and he attended classes in Judaism taught by a rabbi.

A fellow student was János von Neumann, who was a year behind Wigner.

They both benefited from the instruction of the noted mathematics teacher László Rátz.

In 1919, to escape the Béla Kun communist regime, the Wigner family briefly fled to Austria, returning to Hungary after Kun's downfall.

Partly as a reaction to the prominence of Jews in the Kun regime, the family converted to Lutheranism.

Wigner explained later in his life that his family decision to convert to Lutheranism "was not at heart a religious decision but an anti-communist one".

After graduating from the secondary school in 1920, Wigner enrolled at the Budapest University of Technical Sciences, known as the Műegyetem.

He was not happy with the courses on offer, and in 1921 enrolled at the Technische Hochschule Berlin (now Technical University of Berlin), where he studied chemical engineering.

He also attended the Wednesday afternoon colloquia of the German Physical Society.

These colloquia featured leading researchers including Max Planck, Max von Laue, Rudolf Ladenburg, Werner Heisenberg, Walther Nernst, Wolfgang Pauli, and Albert Einstein.

Wigner also met the physicist Leó Szilárd, who at once became Wigner's closest friend.

A third experience in Berlin was formative.

Wigner worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry (now the Fritz Haber Institute), and there he met Michael Polanyi, who became, after László Rátz, Wigner's greatest teacher.

Polanyi supervised Wigner's DSc thesis, Bildung und Zerfall von Molekülen ("Formation and Decay of Molecules").

Wigner returned to Budapest, where he went to work at his father's tannery, but in 1926, he accepted an offer from Karl Weissenberg at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin.

Weissenberg wanted someone to assist him with his work on x-ray crystallography, and Polanyi had recommended Wigner.

In 1930, Princeton University recruited Wigner, along with John von Neumann, and he moved to the United States, where he obtained citizenship in 1937.

Wigner participated in a meeting with Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein that resulted in the Einstein–Szilard letter, which prompted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to initiate the Manhattan Project to develop atomic bombs.

Wigner was afraid that the German nuclear weapon project would develop an atomic bomb first.

During the Manhattan Project, he led a team whose task was to design nuclear reactors to convert uranium into weapons grade plutonium.

At the time, reactors existed only on paper, and no reactor had yet gone critical.

Wigner was disappointed that DuPont was given responsibility for the detailed design of the reactors, not just their construction.

He became director of research and development at the Clinton Laboratory (now the Oak Ridge National Laboratory) in early 1946, but became frustrated with bureaucratic interference by the Atomic Energy Commission, and returned to Princeton.

In the postwar period, he served on a number of government bodies, including the National Bureau of Standards from 1947 to 1951, the mathematics panel of the National Research Council from 1951 to 1954, the physics panel of the National Science Foundation, and the influential General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1952 to 1957 and again from 1959 to 1964.

In later life, he became more philosophical, and published The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, his best-known work outside technical mathematics and physics.

He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles".

A graduate of the Technical University of Berlin, Wigner worked as an assistant to Karl Weissenberg and Richard Becker at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, and David Hilbert at the University of Göttingen.

Wigner and Hermann Weyl were responsible for introducing group theory into physics, particularly the theory of symmetry in physics.

Along the way he performed ground-breaking work in pure mathematics, in which he authored a number of mathematical theorems.

In particular, Wigner's theorem is a cornerstone in the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics.

He is also known for his research into the structure of the atomic nucleus.