He was born Wigner Jenő Pál, and adopted the form Eugene Paul Wigner about the time he moved from Europe to the USA to work at Princeton University.[1]. He had an older sister, Berta, known as Biri, and a younger sister Margit, known as Manci, who later married British theoretical physicist Paul Dirac.
Some sources list his birthplace as Bacs-Kiskun, Hungary.
Wigner worked as an assistant David Hilbert at the University of Göttingen. Wigner and Hermann Weyl were responsible for introducing group theory into physics, particularly the theory of symmetry in physics.
In 1930, Princeton University recruited Wigner, along with John von Neumann, and he moved to the United States, where he obtained citizenship in 1937.
Wigner participated in a meeting with Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein that resulted in the Einstein–Szilard letter, which prompted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to initiate the Manhattan Project to develop atomic bombs.
In 1960, he published a now classic article on the philosophy of mathematics and of physics, which has become his best-known work outside technical mathematics and physics, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences".
He received the Nobel Prize in 1963 "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles".[2]
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