- Person
- Eugene Wigner
- Lived
- 1902–1995
- Field
- Theoretical physics
- From
- Hungarian-American
The story
Eugene Wigner was born in Budapest on 17 November 1902 to a Jewish family; his father managed a leather-tanning factory. At secondary school he and John von Neumann, a year younger, were inspired by the mathematics teacher László Rátz. His father wanted him in the family business, so Wigner studied chemical engineering, first in Budapest and then at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin, while attending physics colloquia with Einstein, Planck and others. In 1925 he earned his doctorate under Michael Polanyi with a pioneering theory of how molecules form and break apart.
In 1926 the crystallographer Karl Weissenberg at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin asked him to help explain why atoms in crystals sit at positions matching the crystal's symmetry axes, telling him that the answer had to do with group theory, the mathematics of symmetry. Wigner soon applied the same ideas to quantum mechanics. In November 1926 he submitted a paper on the spectra of atoms with three electrons; on von Neumann's advice he then studied the theory of group characters developed by Schur, Frobenius and Burnside, and within weeks submitted a general treatment for atoms with any number of electrons.
He went on to lay the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics, and in 1927 introduced the mathematical objects now known as Wigner D-matrices. Wigner and Hermann Weyl were responsible for introducing group theory into quantum mechanics. Weyl's 1928 textbook was hard to follow, especially for younger physicists, and MacTutor notes that Weyl was more interested in the foundations of the theory than in particular problems. Wigner's Gruppentheorie, published in German in 1931 and later translated into English as Group Theory and Its Application to the Quantum Mechanics of Atomic Spectra, made group theory accessible to a much wider audience.
The same year he proved Wigner's theorem, a cornerstone of the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, which describes how symmetries such as rotations and translations act on quantum states. His 1939 paper on the representations of the inhomogeneous Lorentz group has been called one of the most fundamental papers in physics.
In 1963 Wigner received the Nobel Prize in Physics, particularly for the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles. Symmetry has since become one of the organising principles of modern physics, from atomic spectra to the classification of elementary particles.
Why it matters
Wigner's methods gave physicists and chemists the standard tools for using symmetry to understand atoms, molecules, nuclei and particles.
About Eugene Wigner
Budapest-born Nobel physicist who brought symmetry and group theory into quantum mechanics, helped launch the Manhattan Project and designed the first plutonium production reactors.
More about Eugene Wigner
- Eugene Wigner introduced the concept of parityIn his 1927 paper On the Conservation Laws of Quantum Mechanics, Eugene Wigner introduced parity, the mirror symmetry of quantum systems, now a basic idea in physics.
- Eugene Wigner's 1932 function links quantum and classicalIn 1932 Eugene Wigner introduced the Wigner function, a way of picturing quantum states in classical-style phase space now used in quantum optics, chemistry and signal processing.
- The Wigner–Seitz cell helps map crystalsWith his student Frederick Seitz, Eugene Wigner gave his name to the Wigner–Seitz cell, a standard way of dividing up a crystal lattice used throughout solid-state physics.
- Wigner asked why mathematics describes nature so wellEugene Wigner's 1960 essay The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences asked why abstract mathematics fits the physical world so astonishingly well.
Sources
- Eugene Wigner Wikipedia
- Eugene Paul Wigner MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews
- Eugene Wigner: Biographical NobelPrize.org
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