Edward Teller

Edward Teller was a Hungarianborn American theoretical physicist who is known colloquially as the father of the hydrogen bomb, although he claimed he did not care for the title. He made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy and surface physics. His extension of Enrico Fermis theory of beta decay, in the form of the socalled GamowTeller transitions, provided an important stepping stone in its application, while the JahnTeller effect and the BrunauerEmmettTeller theory have retained their original formulation and are still mainstays in physics and chemistry. Teller also made contributions to ThomasFermi theory, the precursor of density functional theory, a standard modern tool in the quantum mechanical treatment of complex molecules. In 1953, along with Nicholas Metropolis and Marshall Rosenbluth, Teller coauthored a paper which is a standard starting point for the applications of the Monte Carlo method to statistical mechanics.

Ede Teller was born on January 15, 1908, in Budapest, Hungary , into a Jewish family. His parents were Ilona , a pianist, and Max Teller, an attorney. Despite being raised in a Jewish family, he later on became an agnostic. Religion was not an issue in my family, he later wrote, indeed, it was never discussed. My only religious training came because the Minta required that all students take classes in their respective religions. My family celebrated one holiday, the Day of Atonement, when we all fasted. Yet my father said prayers for his parents on Saturdays and on all the Jewish holidays. The idea of God that I absorbed was that it would be wonderful if He existed We needed Him desperately but had not seen Him in many thousands of years. Like Einstein and Feynman, Teller was a late talker. He developed the ability to speak later than most children but became very interested in numbers, and would calculate large numbers in his head for fun.

Source: Wikipedia