  The breadth of Eugene Wigner's interests and contributions is amazing and
humbling. At different times in his life he did seminal work in areas as
diverse as pure mathematics and chemical engineering. His seminal research in
physics is, of course, the best known. In this talk I first describe Wigner's
supermultiplet theory of 1936 using the approximate symmetry of the nuclear
Hamiltonian under a combined spin-isospin symmetry to describe the spectroscopy
of stable nuclei up to about the nucleus molybdenum. I then show how Wigner's
ideas of 1936 have had far reaching and unexpected implications: his ideas led
to the discovery of the color degree of freedom for quarks and to the symmetric
quark model of baryons which is the basis of baryon spectroscopy. I conclude by
pointing out that the color degree of freedom, made into a local symmetry using
Yang-Mills theory, leads to the gauge theory of color, quantum chromodynamics,
which is our present theory of the strong interactions.
