Enrico Fermi
1901-1954

Born in Rome, 1901. Educated at the Reala Scuola Normale in Pisa, 1918-22, Ph.D. 1922 with an experimental dissertation on X-ray physics. Fellowship with Max Born in Göttingen, 1923, Leyden in 1924. Faculty at the Firenze, 1925. Professor at the University of Rome, 1926-39. Moved to the U.S. as Professor of Physics, Columbia University, 1939. Named to the Royal Academy (Academia Lencei), Italy, 1929. Nobel Prize for Physics, 1938, for work on transuranic elements using neutron bombardment. Metallurgical Laboratory, University of Chicago, 1942-44. Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, 1944-45. Professor of Physics, University of Chicago, 1946-54.

Early work on general relativity. Introduced Fermi statistics on the basis of the Pauli exclusion principle in the old quantum theory, 1926. Quantized the electromagnetic field, 1930, using a different approach from Dirac. Introduced the Fermi theory of beta decay, 1933. Experimental work on the production of transuranic elements, nuclear fission, other nuclear problems, 1934-42. Designed, supervised first nuclear reactor at the Metallurgical Laboratory. Worked on meson production and scattering, isospin conservation, pion-nucleon resonances, 1951-54. Other work on cosmic ray physics (the Fermi acceleration mechanism), Fermi model for particle production in high-energy collisions.

 

© Loyal Durand, 1999