Eugene Paul Wigner

Nobel Prize Recipient. Eugene Wigner, a Hungarian-born American theoretical physicist, received international professional recognition after being awarded the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics. He received half of the Nobel Prize while German-born American Maria Goeppert Mayer and German physicist J. Hans D. Jensen received the other half for their contributions. He was honored with the award, according to the Nobel Prize committee, "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 received 24 nominations for the Nobel Prize candidacy. Born Jenő Pál Wigner into a middle-class Jewish family in Hungary, his family escaped Communism by relocating to Austria in 1919. He received an early European education before beginning his studies at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and earning a Doctorate in Engineering from the Technical University of Berlin in Germany. He was given the opportunity to do research alongside and under many Nobel Prize recipients with his doctoral thesis being "Formation and Decay of Molecules." After graduation, he held a position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin. Besides theoretical physics, he was active in mathematical physics. In 1931 he was responsible for the Wigner's theorem, a mathematical formulations of quantum mechanics. In 1930 he was recruited by Princeton University to come to the United States for a one-year lectureship contract with a weighted salary, which was extended to a five-year contract. In 1936 he taught at the University of Wisconsin, married Amelia Frank, and unexpectedly, in 1937 was a widower. With the antisemitic educational system of the Nazi Party in Europe, he returned to Princeton University. He became a naturalized American citizen on January 8, 1937, eventually bringing his parents to the United States. In 1938 he became the Thomas D. Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics at Princeton University, retiring in 1971. During World War II, he had a leading position with the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago, from 1942 to 1945. From early 1946 to 1947, he was Director of Research and Development at Clinton Laboratories, which was later named "Oak Ridge National Laboratory," and was under the United States Department of Energy. He returned to Princeton University fulltime in 1947. Besides the Nobel Prize, his awards include receiving the United States Medal for Merit in 1946; the Enrico Fermi Prize in 1958; the Atoms for Peace Award in 1960; the Medal of the Franklin Society; the Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society; the George Washington Award of the American-Hungarian Studies Foundation in 1964; the Semmelweis Medal of the American-Hungarian Medical Association in 1965; and the National Medal of Science in 1969. Including his alma mater, the Technical University of Berlin in Germany, he received sixteen honorary doctorate degrees. He was a member of numerous physics related and educational societies including the National Academy of Science, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and Letters, the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He was a corresponding member of the Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften in Germany, and foreign member of the Royal Society of Great Britain. He was a member of the General Advisory Committee to the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1952 to 1957 and was reappointed to this committee in 1959, serving until 1964. Throughout his career, he published many scientific articles, but "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" in 1960 is one of his most recognized. On June 4, 1941 he married for a second time to Mary Annette Wheeler, a professor of physics at Vassar College, and the couple had a son and a daughter. After his wife's 1977 death, he married for a third time to a widow, Pat Hamilton. At the age of 90, he published his memoirs, "The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner." He died from complications of pneumonia and was buried beside his second wife. His third wife was buried beside her first husband and under his surname. One of his two sisters married British theoretical physicist and 1933 Nobel Prize recipient Paul Dirac .