2 thoughts on “Today’s Jewish Birthday: Leo Szilard”

  1. A brilliant scientist (and humanitarian) – glad to see this bio.
    Not included was that he was one of the major proponents trying to convince President Truman to drop the first Atomic Bomb offshore (to Japan) to demonstrate its destructive power.
    The Wikipedia page on Leo is much more comprehensive
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Szilard
    He never received a Nobel Prize.

    A “lifetime achievement award for Service to Humanity” would have been totally appropriate.
    His wife; Gertrude (Trude) Weiss – Szilard [Austrian-American physician and civil servant] had an illustrious career as well, and spent her later years in San Diego gathering Leo’s papers.
    https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q52149296
    She was a pediatrician colleague of my father’s in Vienna, and I had the privilege (while in high school in Chicago) of spending a Sunday Afternoon with my parents and them at their apartment in Chicago (totally clueless other than that they were “friends of my parents” from Vienna).

  2. Eileen Schiff Wingard

    Thanks for the excellent article paying homage to Leo Szilard, one of the greatest Jewish scientists of the 20th
    century. I had the privilege of knowing his wife, Trude Szilard, a brilliant woman in her own right.

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