Eugene Wigner
Eugene Paul Wigner (Hungarian Wigner Pál Jenő; born November 17, 1902 in Budapest, † January 1, 1995 Princeton, New Jersey) was a Hungarian- American physicist and Nobel laureate.
Life and work
Wigner was born into a Jewish middle-class family and attended in the years 1915 to 1919 together with John von Neumann, the humanist Lutheran Gymnasium in Budapest. He studied chemical engineering and a doctorate in 1925 at the Technical University Berlin with Michael Polanyi with the work " formation and decomposition of molecules, statistical mechanics and reaction speed ." Here, he met Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard know. In his spare time he worked intensively with physics. As a visitor of the colloquia of the German Physical Society, he was soon familiar with the current issues of research and developed a preference for theoretical physics. In 1926 he became assistant to Richard Becker at the Technical University of Berlin, now the Technical University of Berlin. 1928 habilierte Wigner at the Technical University Berlin. In 1930, he was appointed in Berlin for non-tenured associate professor of theoretical physics. Beginning of the 1930s, Wigner in the United States and worked in Princeton since 1931. Due to his Jewish origins he lost after the Nazi seizure of power his position at the TH Berlin and moved permanently to the USA. Apart from two years 1936/37, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin he spent his academic life at Princeton University as professor of mathematics from 1938 until his retirement in 1971. 1937 he became an American citizen. Among his students at Princeton included Frederick Seitz, who later became president of the National Academy of Sciences and of Rockefeller University, and John Bardeen, inventor of the transistor and two-time Nobel laureate in physics.
Wigner was a scientific pioneer, the late twenties, laid the foundation for the application of group theory in physics. Its representation theory of the Poincaré was groundbreaking in mathematics. Together with his Hungarian compatriot Leo Szilard, he also developed the theory of nuclear chain reaction and was involved in the American atomic bomb project in Los Alamos, because he feared that Hitler would have build such a bomb. In the Manhattan Project Wigner planned the construction of the first industrial reactor, the plutonium bomb -grade material erbrütete. Together with him were also working Edward Teller, John von Neumann and Leo Szilard. All four scientists were of Hungarian descent and were called because of their " supernatural " mental abilities from their American colleagues as " Martians ".
In addition to numerous terms that bear his name explicitly, see below, " generated ", he implicitly numerous fundamental techniques in the whole field of theoretical physics: How to, inter alia, the widely used theory of random matrices back to him, as he described the spectra of highly excited nuclei in this way and one hastened to their symmetry property in symplectic or unitary or orthogonal symmetry classes. This seemingly very specific theory has, among other things later in theoretical solid state physics variety of different kind of applications found in connection with the problem of so-called Anderson localization.
On May 18, 1960 Wigner was, together with Szilárd, the Atoms for Peace Award, 1961, the Max Planck Medal and awarded in 1963 with J. Hans D. Jensen and Maria Goeppert- Mayer, the Nobel Prize for Physics. He received the award for his many contributions to nuclear physics, among other things, for his formulation of the law of conservation of parity ( "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles "). The Nobel laureate Wigner was popular and revered for his humble and restrained Art
His versatility was enormous: With Gian- Carlo Wick and Arthur Wightman, he introduced, for example, 1956 Super - selection rules and the internal parity of elementary particles.
Wigner also made his philosophical ideas about physics and its relation to mathematics. His essay, The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences has become proverbial. His thought experiment Wigner's friend represents a subjectivist interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Eugene P. Wigner 1968, the National Medal of Science and the 1972 Albert Einstein Award.
Since 24 November 2005, a building of the Physics Institute at the Technical University of Berlin is named after him. The Wigner Medal, and the Eugene P. Wigner Reactor Physicist Award is named in his honor.
The famous physicist Paul Dirac was married to his sister Margit.