The Hungarian-born American physicist Eugene Paul Wigner (1902-1995) formulated symmetry principles and, together with group theory, applied them in atomic, nuclear, and elementary particle physics.

On November 17, 1902, Eugene P. Wigner was born in Budapest, the son of Anthony Wigner, a leather manufacturer, and Elisabeth Einhorn Wigner. In 1920 he entered the Technical Institute in Budapest, where, at his father's urging, he concentrated on chemical engineering although his principal interest lay in mathematics. A year later he transferred to the Technische Hochschule in Berlin, still majoring in engineering. However, before long he was a regular visitor at the physics colloquia attended by some of the chief leaders in physics in Germany at that time, including Albert Einstein, Walther Nernst, and Max Planck.

Wigner's doctoral thesis was on the formation and disintegration of molecules. After a year and a half of work as leather chemist, Wigner eagerly accepted the offer of...