Leó Szilárd
Hungarian-American Jewish physicist and inventor (1898–1964)
AI overview
Leó Szilárd was a Hungarian-American physicist and inventor who lived from 1898 to 1964. He is historically significant for his scientific contributions and innovations during a transformative period in physics, though his specific accomplishments and their impact would require further exploration to fully understand.
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Person · Open Library
- Born
- 11 February 1898
- Died
- 30 May 1964
- Works
- 15
Top works
- The Voice of the Dolphins
- Laughing Space
- The light fantastic
- We the Resistance
- Leo Szilard
via Open Library + Wikidata
Film & TV
Acting
Known for
- Cold War Secrets: Stealing the Atomic Bomb — Self (archive footage)2015
- Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie — Self (archive footage)1995
- The Exiles — Self1989
- Small World — Self1958
via TMDB
Article
Leo Szilard (/ˈsɪlɑːrd/; Hungarian: Leó Szilárd [ˈlɛoː ˈsilaːrd]; born Leó Spitz; February 11, 1898 – May 30, 1964) was a Hungarian-born American physicist, biologist and inventor who made numerous important discoveries in nuclear physics and the biological sciences. He conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, and patented the idea in 1936. In late 1939 he wrote the Einstein–Szilard letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, and then in 1945 wrote the Szilard petition asking president Harry S. Truman to demonstrate the bomb without dropping it on civilians. According to György Marx, he was one of the Hungarian scientists known as The Martians.
Szilard initially attended Palatine Joseph Technical University in Budapest, but his engineering studies were interrupted by service in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I. He left Hungary for Germany in 1919, enrolling at Technische Hochschule (Institute of Technology) in Berlin-Charlottenburg (now Technische Universität Berlin), but became bored with engineering and transferred to Friedrich Wilhelm University, where he studied physics. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Maxwell's demon, a long-standing puzzle in the philosophy of thermal and statistical physics. Szilard was the first scientist of note to recognize the connection between thermodynamics and information theory.
Gallery (8)
Connections
Categories
1898 births1964 deaths20th-century American Jews20th-century American letter writers20th-century American physicists20th-century Hungarian engineers20th-century Hungarian inventors20th-century Hungarian physicistsAccelerator physicistsAmerican agnosticsAmerican nuclear physicistsBudapest University of Technology and Economics alumni