page_title: Leo Szilard
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Leo Szilard / After the war / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: Concrete and teak facades — Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California
context_page_description: Leo Szilard was a Hungarian-American physicist and inventor. He conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea of a nuclear fission reactor in 1934, and in late 1939 wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb. 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 in Berlin-Charlottenburg, 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 to recognize the connection between thermodynamics and information theory.
  In addition to the nuclear reactor, Szilard submitted the earliest patent applications for the electron microscope, the linear accelerator, and the cyclotron in Germany.
context_section_description: Before relation with his later wife Gertrud Weiss, Leo Szilard's life partner in the period 1927 – 1934 was kindergarten teacher and opera singer Gerda Philipsborn, who also worked as a volunteer in a Berlin asylum organization for refugee children and in 1932 moved to India to continue in this work. Szilard married Gertrud (Trude) Weiss, a physician, in a civil ceremony in New York on October 13, 1951. They had known each other since 1929, and had frequently corresponded and visited each other ever since. Weiss took up a teaching position at the University of Colorado in April 1950, and Szilard began staying with her in Denver for weeks at a time when they had never been together for more than a few days before. Single people living together was frowned upon in the conservative United States at the time, and after they were discovered by one of her students, Szilard began to worry that she might lose her job. Their relationship remained a long-distance one, and they kept news of their marriage quiet. Many of his friends were shocked when they found out, as it was widely believed that Szilard was a born bachelor.
caption: Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, San Diego
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