Leo Szilard Facts
Leo Szilard Facts
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| Interesting Leo Szilard Facts: |
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| Leo Szilard was born in Budapest, Hungary. |
| From 1908 to 1916 he attended Realiskola high school and in 1916 he won the Eotvos Prize, a national prize for mathematics. |
| In 1917 he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army but contracted the Spanish flu and did not go into battle. |
| After the war he continued his studies at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin where he took classes from Albert Einstein, Max Planck and Max von Laue. |
| In 1923 he received a PhD in physics from the University of Berlin and his doctoral thesis, On the Manifestation of Thermodynamic Fluctuations, won top honors.. |
| In 1928 he submitted a patent application for a linear accelerator and in 1929 he applied for a patent for a cyclotron. |
| In 1933 he left Germany and went to Vienna and in 1934 he moved to London and joined the physics department of the medical college of St. Bartholomew's Hospital. |
| He and British physicist, T.A. Chalmers, developed the first method of separating isotopes. |
| In 1937 he accepted a post at Columbia University where he continued to work on a continuous chain reaction with Enrico Fermi. |
| In 1939 he discussed the development of a sustained nuclear reaction with Albert Einstein and he drafted a letter to President Roosevelt recommended the development of the atomic bomb. |
| From 1942 to 1945 he worked with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago to construct the first nuclear reactor. |
| He became a U.S. citizen in 1943. |
| In 1946 he became professor of biophysics at the University of Chicago. |
| After World War II he promoted the peaceful uses of atomic energy and founded the Council for a Liveable World. |
| In 1959 he received the Atoms for Peace Award and in 1960 he was named Humanist of the Year. |
| He died in his sleep of a heart attack. |
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