Eugene Wigner

Eugene Paul Wigner (Hungarian Wigner Pál Jen?) (November 17, 1902 – January 1, 1995) was a Hungarian physicist and mathematician who 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". Within the world of physics, Wigner was referred to as "the Silent Genius" as he was thought of by his contemporaries as the intellectual equal to Einstein, without the noteriety.

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Hungarian - November 17 - 1902 - January 1 - 1995 - Hungarian - Physicist - Mathematician - Nobel Prize in Physics

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He was one of a generation of physicists of the 1920s who remade the world of physics. This generation was a collection of people from Berlin to London to Zürich to Pisa, though not quite yet to New York or Chicago, Illinois. The first physicists in this new generation — Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and Paul Dirac, to name three — created quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics was a dazzling new world, which threw open dozens of fundamental physical questions. A new set of men (and a few women) came along behind them, to answer the first questions and pose others, often more complex.

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1920s - Physics - Berlin - London - Zürich - Pisa - New York - Chicago, Illinois - Werner Heisenberg - Erwin Schrödinger - Paul Dirac - Quantum mechanics

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Wigner was in this second set of physicists. He posed and answered some of the most profound questions of 20th-century physics. He laid the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics. In the late 1930s, he extended his research into atomic nuclei.

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Symmetries - 1930s - Atomic nuclei

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Between 1939 and 1945, this generation of physicists helped to remake the world again. This time it was a far greater, more public world they remade: one of armies, peoples, ideologies. They did it first by seeing that an atomic bomb could be built; and then by arguing that it must be built, in the United States, immediately; and finally by playing the crucial role in getting the bomb built, under terrible pressure.

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1939 - 1945 - Atomic bomb

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Wigner was a giant of atomic bomb production as well.

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Wigner was one of a group of renowned Jewish-Hungarian scientists and mathematicians from turn-of-the-century Budapest, including Paul Erd?s, Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and Leó Szilárd. Szilárd was probably Wigner's best adult friend. Von Neumann was a schoolmate and mentor, whom Wigner later described as "the brightest man I have ever known on this Earth." Wigner was the only one of the four to win a Nobel Prize.

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Paul Erd?s - Edward Teller - John von Neumann - Leó Szilárd - Nobel Prize

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