Enrico Fermi

Enrico Fermi , 1901-54, American physicist, b. Italy. He studied at Pisa, Göttingen, and Leiden, and taught physics at the universities of Florence and Rome. He contributed to the early theory of beta decay and the neutrino and to quantum statistics. For his experiments with neutrons he was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics. Fermi's wife, Laura, was Jewish, and the family did not return to Fascist Italy after the journey to Stockholm to receive the Nobel award, but continued on to the United States. Fermi was professor of physics at Columbia Univ. (1939-45) and at the Univ. of Chicago (1946-54). He created the first self-sustaining chain reaction in uranium at Chicago in 1942 and worked on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. Later he contributed to the development of the hydrogen bomb and served on the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, which named him to receive its first special award ($25,000) shortly before his death. Fermi was outstanding as an experimenter, theorist, and teacher. He wrote Elementary Particles (1951). In 1954 the chemical element fermium of atomic number 100 was named for him. Publication of his Collected Papers (ed. by Edoardo Amaldi et al.) was begun in 1962.

Bibliography: See L. Fermi, Atoms in the Family (1954, repr. 1988); biography by E. Segrè (1970).

Fermi, Enrico (1901–1954), one of the foremost physicists of the twentieth century.Enrico Fermi was born in Rome and educated at the University of Pisa in Italy (Ph.D., 1922), and subsequently at the universities of Gottingen (Germany), Leiden (Holland), and Michigan (United States). In 1926, he made his first major discovery of quantum statistics (now known as Fermi‐Dirac statistics). He accepted an appointment to Columbia University in 1939 and from there verified that nuclear fission was possible. The potential applications of this enterprise were immediately evident to the military. At the request of the U.S. government, Fermi took his research team to the University of Chicago, where in December 1942 they demonstrated the first self‐sustaining chain reaction. Fermi's discoveries and his ability to apply them made him a key player in the development of the Manhattan Project, the highly classified research that ultimately resulted in the creation and detonation of the first atomic bomb. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, cessation of the war in the Pacific, and the start of the Atomic Age followed. After World War II, Fermi was appointed director of what became the Enrico Fermi Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago until his death in 1954.
[See also Atomic Scientists; Nuclear Weapons.]

Bibliography

Emilio Segre , Enrico Fermi: Physicist, 1970.
Laura Fermi , Atoms in the Family: My Life with Enrico Fermi, 1971.

Peter J. McNelis