page_title: Edward Teller
section_title: Death and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Edward Teller / Death and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Edward Teller appearing on television discussion programme After Dark 3 July 1987 ("Peace In Our Time"). (c)1987 Open Media Ltd.
context_page_description: Edward Teller was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb", although he did not care for the title, and was only part of a team who developed the technology. Throughout his life, Teller was known both for his scientific ability and for his difficult interpersonal relations and volatile personality.
  Teller was born in Hungary in 1908, and emigrated to the United States in the 1930s, one of the many so-called "Martians", a group of prominent Hungarian scientist émigrés. He made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy, and surface physics. His extension of Enrico Fermi's theory of beta decay, in the form of Gamow–Teller transitions, provided an important stepping stone in its application, while the Jahn–Teller effect and the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller theory have retained their original formulation and are still mainstays in physics and chemistry.
  Teller also made contributions to Thomas–Fermi theory, the precursor of density functional theory, a standard modern tool in the quantum mechanical treatment of complex molecules.
context_section_description: Teller died in Stanford, California on September 9, 2003, at the age of 95. He had suffered a stroke two days before and had long been suffering from a number of conditions related to his advanced age.
  A wish for his 100th birthday, made around the time of his 90th, was for Lawrence Livermore's scientists to give him "excellent predictions—calculations and experiments—about the interiors of the planets".
  In his early career, Teller made contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy (the Jahn–Teller and Renner–Teller effects), and surface physics. His extension of Fermi's theory of beta decay (in the form of the so-called Gamow–Teller transitions) provided an important stepping stone in the applications of this theory. The Jahn–Teller effect and the BET theory have retained their original formulation and are still mainstays in physics and chemistry. Teller also made contributions to Thomas–Fermi theory, the precursor of density functional theory, a standard modern tool in the quantum mechanical treatment of complex molecules.
  Teller's vigorous advocacy for strength through nuclear weapons, especially when so many of his wartime colleagues later expressed regret about the arms race, made him an easy target for the "mad scientist" stereotype. In 1991 he was awarded one of the first Ig Nobel Prizes for Peace in recognition of his "lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it". He was also rumored to be one of the inspirations for the character of Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 satirical film of the same name (other inspirations were speculated to be RAND theorist Herman Kahn,
  mathematician John von Neumann, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara). In the aforementioned Scientific American interview from 1999, he was reported as having bristled at the question: "My name is not Strangelove. I don't know about Strangelove. I'm not interested in Strangelove. What else can I say?... Look. Say it three times more, and I throw you out of this office." In one episode of Mission Hill (1999), a character appears to be inspired by Edward Teller. The character is very old, has pictures of himself and other scientists in his home office and is known as the father of the nuclear bomb.
  Nobel Prize winning physicist Isidor I. Rabi once suggested that "It would have been a better world without Teller." In addition, Teller's false claims that Stanislaw Ulam made no significant contribution to the development of the hydrogen bomb (despite Ulam's key insights of using compression and staging elements to generate the thermonuclear reaction) and his personal attacks on Oppenheimer caused great animosity towards Teller within the general physics community.
  In 1981, Teller became a founding member of the World Cultural Council.
  In 1986, he was awarded the United States Military Academy's Sylvanus Thayer Award. He was elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1948. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Nuclear Society. Among the honors he received were the Albert Einstein Award in 1958, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1961,  the Enrico Fermi Award in 1962, the Eringen Medal in 1980, the Harvey Prize in 1975, the National Medal of Science in 1983, the Presidential Citizens Medal in 1989, and the Corvin Chain in 2001. He was also named as part of the group of "U.S. Scientists" who were Time magazine's People of the Year in 1960, and an asteroid, 5006 Teller, is named after him. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush in 2003, less than two months before his death.
  His final paper, published posthumously, advocated the construction of a prototype liquid fluoride thorium reactor. The genesis and impetus for this last paper was recounted by the co-author Ralph Moir in 2007.
caption: Appearing on British television discussion After Dark in 1987
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