Edward Teller

Born in Austria-Hungary in 1908, Teller arrived in the U.S. in the 1930s among the wave of Hungarian émigrés known as "the Martians." His early work yielded tools still in use: Gamow-Teller transitions in beta decay, the Jahn-Teller effect, BET theory in surface physics, contributions to what became density functional theory and Monte Carlo methods in statistical mechanics. He joined the Manhattan Project but kept pushing for fusion weapons even as the war ended. In 1953 he co-founded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to pursue the hydrogen bomb, which bore his and Ulam's design. That same year his testimony helped strip Oppenheimer of clearance, and the scientific community largely shut him out. The government didn't: Teller spent his later decades advocating for nuclear everything - power, arsenals, testing, Project Chariot's plan to carve an Alaskan harbor with a thermonuclear blast, Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. He collected the Fermi and Einstein awards and died in 2003 at 95, still certain the atom could solve what politics couldn't.