Eugene Paul Wigner was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary) on November 17, 1902. A year after receiving a doctorate in chemical engineering from the Technische Hochschule in Berlin in 1925, Wigner received an invitation to work as an assistant to the well-known physical chemist R. Becker. Inspired by Becker, Wigner began writing papers of his own, exploring how the mathematical concept known as group theory could be used as a tool in the new quantum mechanics. On the strength of this work, Wigner was invited in 1927 to join the physics department of the University of Göttingen, as an assistant to the mathematician David Hilbert.

At Göttingen, Wigner developed his law of the conservation of parity, which states that no fundamental distinction can be made between left and right in physics. The laws of physics are the same in a right-handed system of coordinates as they are...