Wigner, Eugene Paul

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Wigner, Eugene Paul (1902–95) US physicist, b. Hungary. During World War 2, Wigner worked on the Manhattan Project. He was the first physicist to apply group theory to quantum mechanics. With this technique, he discovered the law of conservation of parity. For his work on the structure of the atomic nucleus, Wigner shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in physics with Hans Jensen and Maria Goeppert-Mayer.

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