Edward Teller, German Eduard Teller, Hungarian Ede Teller (* January 15th, 1908 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary) is a Hungarian-American Physicist.
He studied Chemistry in Karlsruhe, but changed to Physics after two years. In 1928, he moved to Munich, where he lost a foot because of an accident involving a tram and had to wear a Prothesis from then on. In the same year, he moved to Leipzig, where he wrote his thesis under Werner Heisenberg. Because of his Jewish family he decided to leave Nazi Germany in 1933 and emigrated to England. Afterwards he went to Copenhagen, Denmark, with a Rockefeller Stipendium, to work under Niels Bohr. In 1935, he emigrated to the USA. There, he started working on the Manhattan Project, which would later develop the first nuclear bombs. But initially, he researched Quantum, Molecular, and nuclear physics.
In June of 1939, Teller moved from Washington to the Columbia University in New York City, to work there with Enrico Fermi and Leó Szilárd at the construction of a Nuclear reactor for creating Energy. About one Month before the invasion of Poland on September 1st, 1939 – start of World War II in Europe – Szilárd formulated a letter addressed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in which they hinted at the possibility of the construction of a Uranium Bomb in Nazi Germany. They also had the letter signed by Albert Einstein, to give it more weight.
Together with other great Hungarian-Jewish scientists like Paul Erdős, John von Neumann, Leó Szilárd, and Eugene Wigner, who also emigrated to the USA, they're called "The Martians", because of their unconventional ways of thinking.
On February 26th in 1934, he married Augusta Maria „Mici“ Harkanyi in Budapest.