Eugene Wigner

Born in Hungary in 1902, Wigner studied at the Technical Hochschule Berlin and worked under Hilbert at Göttingen before Princeton recruited him in 1930. With Hermann Weyl, he introduced group theory and symmetry principles into physics, work that earned him the 1963 Nobel Prize for contributions to atomic nucleus and elementary particle theory. In 1939 he sat in the meeting with Szilard and Einstein that produced the letter prompting Roosevelt to investigate nuclear weapons; during the Manhattan Project he led the team designing reactors to convert uranium into weapons-grade plutonium, though he chafed when DuPont took over detailed design. After a brief frustrated stint directing research at Clinton Laboratory, he returned to Princeton and served on multiple government advisory panels through the 1960s. In his later years he turned philosophical, publishing "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" - a meditation that outlasted his technical work in the public mind.