Eugene Wigner

Origins and early life

Eugene Wigner was born Wigner Jenő Pál in Budapest on 17 November 1902, the son of Antal Wigner, manager of a leather factory, and of Elisabeth Einhorn. His family was Jewish but not observant, his bar mitzvah was a secular one, and at the Lutheran gymnasium of Budapest, where religious education was compulsory, he attended classes in Judaism taught by a rabbi.

Work and career

After a brief flight to Austria in 1919 from the communist regime of Béla Kun, the family converted to Lutheranism, a decision he later called not at heart a religious one but an anti-communist one. At school he was taught by the mathematician László Rátz alongside John von Neumann, and he then studied chemical engineering in Berlin, taking his doctorate under Michael Polanyi. In Berlin and Göttingen he and Hermann Weyl brought group theory into quantum mechanics, laying the foundation of the theory of symmetries, and his book of 1931 made the method accessible to a wider audience.

Princeton recruited him in 1930 with von Neumann, and in 1933 he showed that the force binding protons and neutrons is weak at a distance but very strong at close range. When Hitler came to power that year he knew that his posts in Berlin would be cancelled because of his Jewish background, and he became an American citizen in 1937. On 2 August 1939 he took part in the meeting with Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein that led to the letter to Roosevelt, and in the Manhattan Project he led the team that designed the reactors to produce plutonium.

Recognition

In 1963 he received half of the Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Maria Goeppert Mayer and Hans Jensen, for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles. Professor at Princeton from 1938 until 1971, he died of pneumonia in Princeton on 1 January 1995, at ninety-two.