Eugene Wigner

Wigner met Amelia Frank, a physics student at the University of Wisconsin. They got married in 1936 but she died of cancer within a year.

In 1941, he married Mary Annete Wheeler and the couple had two children, David and Martha.

After the death of his second wife in 1977, Wigner married Eileen Clare-Patton (Pat) Hamilton, the widow of physicist Donald Ross Hamilton, in 1979. They had a daughter, Erika.

Wigner was born on 17 November 1902 in an upper-middle-class family in Budapest, Hungary. His father, Antal Wigner, was manager at a leather tanning factory and his mother, Erzsébet was a devoted housewife. He had two other siblings.

He received education at home and was enrolled in school in the third grade when he was nine.

At the age of 11, he was mistakenly diagnosed with tuberculosis and was sent to live for six weeks in a sanatorium in Austria.

From 1915 through 1919, he studied at the secondary grammar school called Fasori Evangélikus Gimnázium.

Eugene’s peaceful childhood in Budapest was interrupted by World War I, and his family was forced to flee to Austria when Hungary was under communist rule for most of 1919.

In 1926 he accepted an offer from Karl Weissenberg at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin to work on x-ray crystallography. After assisting Weissenberg for six months, he worked for Richard Becker for two semesters.

In 1927 Wigner joined the mathematician David Hilbert as an assistant at the University of Göttingen. This was an important time for him and he produced the paper, ‘On the conservation laws of quantum mechanics’ which introduced the new concept of parity.

In 1930 Princeton University engaged Wigner for a one-year lectureship.

In 1931 he published ‘Group Theory and Its Application to the Quantum Mechanics of Atomic Spectra’.

From 1930 to 1933 Wigner spent half of the year at Princeton, half at Berlin lecturing at the Technische Hochschule.

His most important work was his formulation of the law of the conservation of parity, an integral part of quantum mechanics. It states that it is not possible to differentiate left from right in fundamental physical interactions.

While working on the Manhattan Project, he discovered the swelling of the graphite moderator by neuron radiation; a phenomenon now termed as ‘Wigner effect’.