Biography

Leo Szilard was born in Budapest, in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. His father, Miksa Teller, was a well-known lawyer. After completing four years at the Mellinger Elementary School, his parents had to decide where he should continue his studies. In 1917, he began attending the "Model Gymnasium" (now the ELTE Trefort Ágoston Practice School, then known as the Royal Hungarian Teacher Training Secondary School), where he graduated with distinction in 1925. Notable contemporaries from the same school included (Lord) Tamás Balogh, (Lord) Miklós Káldor, Tódor Kármán, Miklós Kürti, Péter Lax, Mihály Polányi, and Mór Kálmán. While still in Budapest, he met his future "Martian" friends: John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner. He later stated that he owed his scientific success to the fact that Hungarian was his mother tongue; otherwise, he would have become "just a mediocre secondary school teacher." He believed that his native language often served as a tool for developing logical thinking.Although he was interested in mathematics, his father advised him to choose a more practical path, leading him to settle on chemical engineering. He enrolled at the Royal Joseph Technical University but left the country on January 2, 1926, believing that Germany would be less anti-Semitic than Hungary during the Horthy era, especially after the implementation of the numerus clausus law. During his time abroad, he returned home every summer, and in 1933, he married his childhood sweetheart, Augusta Schütz-Harkányi (Mici).

Career

Teller studied chemistry and mathematics in Karlsruhe, where in 1927, Professor Hermann Mark discussed quantum mechanics as the foundation of physics. This inspired him to shift his focus to physics. By the fall of 1928, he was studying at the University of Leipzig, where Werner Heisenberg was his professor. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the excited states of the ionized hydrogen molecule, which he defended in 1930. Afterward, he initially worked on molecular spectroscopy, with his most notable achievement being the Jahn–Teller effect (1937). He then moved to Göttingen, where he became an assistant to the future Nobel laureate James Franck. In 1933, he co-developed the Pöschl–Teller potential function with Pöschl to describe bending motions. Subsequently, he received a Hungarian State Scholarship to work in Rome with Enrico Fermi, followed by a Rockefeller Fellowship in Copenhagen, where he collaborated with Niels Bohr. During this time, he met George Gamow, a refugee from Ukraine, with whom he took long motorcycle trips. He later emigrated to the United States, where he taught at George Washington University, where Gamow also became a professor. He taught quantum mechanics to American students and their professors.