WIGNER, Jenö
* 17. 11. 1902, Budapest, Hungary
† 4. 1. 1995, Princeton, USA
Physicist
As son of a middle-class industrial family, W. was able to attend a renown Lutheran Secondary School and continued his education at the Faculty of Chemistry, which was a part of the Technical University of Budapest. After a year he transferred to the Institute of technology in Berlin-Charlottenburg. He began his career as a chemical engineer in his father's leather factory in Budapest, but returned to Berlin already the following year, and then worked as a private lecturer at the University of Göttingen. His work in the field of quantum mechanics brought him an invitation to lecture at Princeton University in the USA. In 1931 Princeton University recruited W., but only part-time, thus he kept a post in Göttingen. In 1935 he finally moved to the United States. In 1939 he via Niels Bohr and Leo → Szilárd received the news about the successful uranium fission, in which Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman had succeeded in Berlin. W. and → Szilárd realized the danger of atomic bomb and via Albert Einstein informed the President Franklin D. Roosewelt about it. Consequently, the USA launched its "Manhattan Project". During the construction of the first nuclear reactor, W. worked as an assistant of Fremi and → Szilárd until 1942.
After World War II he returned to Princeton, but held lectures worldwide. In 1963 he received the Nobel Prize for Physics, for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles. He was given the "Atom for Peace" prize and the Fermi award and honorary doctorates at 24 universities. He published about 350 scientific works.
