He received the Nobel Prize in Physics 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".

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 authorize the creation of the Advisory Committee on Uranium with the purpose of investigating the feasibility of nuclear weapons.

During the Manhattan Project, he led a team whose task was to design nuclear reactors to convert uranium into weapons grade plutonium.

His parents sent him to live for six weeks in a sanatorium in the Austrian mountains, before the doctors concluded that the diagnosis was mistaken.

[9] After graduating from the secondary school in 1920, Wigner enrolled at the Budapest University of Technical Sciences, known as the Műegyetem.

Polanyi supervised Wigner's DSc thesis, Bildung und Zerfall von Molekülen ("Formation and Decay of Molecules").

[14] Wigner returned to Budapest, where he went to work at his father's tannery, but in 1926, he accepted an offer from Karl Weissenberg at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin.

[15] Wigner received a request from Arnold Sommerfeld to work at the University of Göttingen as an assistant to the great mathematician David Hilbert.

The latter had written a standard text, Group Theory and Quantum Mechanics (1928), but it was not easy to understand, especially for younger physicists.

In 1930, Princeton University recruited Wigner for a one-year lectureship, at 7 times the salary that he had been drawing in Europe.

[27] Although he was a professed political amateur, on August 2, 1939, he participated in a meeting with Leó Szilárd and Albert Einstein that resulted in the Einstein–Szilárd letter, which prompted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to authorize the creation of the Advisory Committee on Uranium with the purpose of investigating the feasibility of atomic bombs.

[28] Wigner was afraid that the German nuclear weapon project would develop an atomic bomb first, and even refused to have his fingerprints taken because they could be used to track him down if Germany won.

"[29] On June 4, 1941, Wigner married his second wife, Mary Annette Wheeler, a professor of physics at Vassar College, who had completed her Ph.D. at Yale University in 1932.

[32] During the Manhattan Project, Wigner led a team that included J. Ernest Wilkins Jr., Alvin M. Weinberg, Katharine Way, Gale Young and Edward Creutz.

The group's task was to design the production nuclear reactors that would convert uranium into weapons grade plutonium.

In July 1942, Wigner chose a conservative 100 MW design, with a graphite neutron moderator and water cooling.

As it turned out, a design decision by DuPont to give the reactor additional load tubes for more uranium saved the project when neutron poisoning became a problem.

[41] Through Manhattan project funding, Wigner and Leonard Eisenbud also developed an important general approach to nuclear reactions, the Wigner–Eisenbud R-matrix theory, which was published in 1947.

[45] When the newly created Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) took charge of the laboratory's operations at the start of 1947, Wigner feared that many of the technical decisions would be made in Washington.

[47] One such incident occurred in March 1947, when the AEC discovered that Wigner's scientists were conducting experiments with a critical mass of uranium-235 when the director of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., had forbidden such experiments in August 1946 after the death of Louis Slotin at the Los Alamos Laboratory.

Wigner argued that Groves's order had been superseded, but was forced to terminate the experiments, which were completely different from the one that killed Slotin.

These included Richard Hamming in Computer Science,[54] Arthur Lesk in Molecular Biology,[55] Peter Norvig in data mining,[56] Max Tegmark in Physics,[57] Ivor Grattan-Guinness in Mathematics,[58] and Vela Velupillai in Economics.

In November 1963, Wigner called for the allocation of 10% of the national defense budget to be spent on nuclear blast shelters and survival resources, arguing that such an expenditure would be less costly than disarmament.

[63] Wigner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 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".

[73][74] After his retirement from Princeton in 1971, Wigner prepared the first edition of Symmetries and Reflections, a collection of philosophical essays, and became more involved in international and political meetings; around this time he became a leader[75] and vocal defender[76] of the Unification Church's annual International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences.

"[78] In his collection of essays 'Philosophical Reflections and Syntheses' (1995), he commented: "It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.

"[79] Wigner was credited as a member of the advisory board for the Western Goals Foundation, a private domestic intelligence agency created in the US in 1979 to "fill the critical gap caused by the crippling of the FBI, the disabling of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the destruction of crucial government files".