Wigner, Eugene Paul (1902-1995), was a Hungarian-born American theoretical physicist. He shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in physics with J. Hans Jensen and Maria Goeppert Mayer for his research on the use of a property known as symmetry in theories of the atom and the nucleus. He also worked with a team of scientists who in 1942 produced the first nuclear chain reaction. In 1958, he won the Atomic Energy Award Commission’s Enrico Fermi Award, and he shared the 1959 Atoms for Peace Award with Leo Szilard. He became a lecturer at Princeton University in 1930 and later became a professor there.
Wigner was born on Nov. 17, 1902, in Budapest, Hungary. In 1937, he became a United States citizen. He died on Jan. 1, 1995.
