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Leó Szilárd (Hungarian: Szilárd Leó, February 11, 1898 – May 30, 1964) was a Hungarian physicist...

Leó Szilárd (Hungarian: Szilárd Leó, February 11, 1898 – May 30, 1964) was a Hungarian physicist who conceived the nuclear chain reaction and worked on the Manhattan Project. He was born in Budapest in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and died in La Jolla, California. Szilárd was born into a Jewish family of 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 during 1916 but had to join the Austro-Hungarian Army during 1917 as officer-candidate where he was discharged honorably at the end of the war. During 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 caused the introduction of a numerus clausus for Jewish students at Hungary's universities. He continued engineering studies at Technische Hochschule (Institute of Technology) in Berlin-Charlottenburg. He soon changed to physics there and took physics classes from Einstein, Planck, and Max von Laue. His dissertation on thermodynamics