Leó Szilárd

Leó Szilárd (Hungarian: Szilárd Leó, February 11, 1898 – May 30, 1964) was a Hungarian-American physicist who conceived the nuclear chain reaction and worked on the Manhattan Project. He was born in Budapest under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and died in La Jolla, California. Szilárd was born in Budapest at the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy before World War I as the son of a civil engineer. From 1908-1916 he attended Reáliskola in his home town. He was enrolled as an engineering student at Budapest Technical University in 1916 but had to join the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1917 as officer-candidate where he was honorably discharged at the end of the war. In 1919 he resumed engineering studies at Budapest Technical University but soon decided to leave Hungary because of the rising antisemitism under the Horthy regime which led to the introduction of a numerus clausus for Jewish students at Hungary's universities. He continued engineering studies at Technische Hochschule ... full article at wikipedia