Leó Szilárd

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.