Eugene Wigner (1902-1995) is a Hungarian-American Physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963. He and his parents were Lutherans converted from Judaism for political reasons, than religious. He has made immense contributions to mathematical physics, particularly to particle physics.

However, he is known more for a statement he made about mathematics. He wrote a short and innocent essay in 1960, titled, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” This essay reflects his own philosophical amazement on the mysteriousness of mathematics. On the one hand he is amazed at the power of mathematics in describing the laws of nature and the physical universe. At the same we are unable to realize how mathematics is so effective in describing nature. Accordingly, he made this provocative conclusion in this short essay, “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics to the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.” It is a humble acknowledgement of the limits of the scientific knowledge and a humble confession that science itself is at a loss to explain the power of its own epistemic tools. For him, the power of mathematics is a sort of miracle. “It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them.”

The remark in Wikipedia that he was an atheist on religious views is not a just assessment of the mindset of Wigner. His remark in his famous essay is a clear indication of his philosophical blend of mind. Bulgarian theologian Bojidar Marinov writes “The arrogant claim that science will explain the world more and more came to an end; science can’t even explain itself anymore. The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it… Wigner added insult to injury when he ended his article using almost religious language of humbleness, gratitude and faith …”

Many were frustrated by the treason caused by Wigner to science. Some of them ignored him or objected to his conclusions or to the premises. But no one could give a reasonable explanation to observation he made about the mysteriousness of mathematics.