Edward Teller

Edward Teller (born Teller Ede, 1908-2003) was a Hungarian-born American nuclear physicist, and an early participant in the Manhattan Project. Of Jewish descent, Teller emigrated to the United States in the 1930s to escape the spread of Nazism in Europe.

Sam Yeager couldn't help but contrast men like Teller and his colleagues, generally "dumpy foreigners with funny accents," with the "near-supermen" scientists found in the science fiction he read.