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Enrico Fermi: Physicist Enrico Fermi
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A key figure in the development of nuclear fission, Enrico Fermi was an Italian physicist who worked in the United States on the Manhattan Project, the top-secret plan to develop the world's first atomic bomb. Fermi became a professor of physics at the University of Rome in 1926. After the discovery of the neutron in 1932 by James Chadwick, Fermi turned his attention to the idea that bombarding elements with neutral particles could cause transmutations and create new elements not found in nature. His work earned him the Nobel Prize in 1938 and put him on the path of creating uranium fission. Immediately after accepting the prize in Stockholm, Fermi and his wife moved to the U.S. to escape the fascist government of Italy's Benito Mussolini. Fermi worked in the physics department of Columbia University (1939-42) before being assigned as one of the directors of the Manhattan Project with J. Robert Oppenheimer.
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Nobel laureate and scientific luminary Enrico Fermi (1901-54) was a pioneering nuclear physicist whose contributions to the field were numerous, profound, and lasting. Best known for his involvement with the Manhattan Project and his work at Los Alamos that led to the first self-sustained nuclear reaction and ultimately to the production of electric power and plutonium for atomic weapons, Fermi's legacy continues to color the character of the sciences at the University of Chicago. During his tenure as professor of physics at the Institute for Nuclear Studies, Fermi attracted an extraordinary scientific faculty and many talented students—ten Nobel Prizes were awarded to faculty or students under his tutelage.
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"Enrico Fermi shaped the destiny of physics from the Manhattan Project through the present times," said Tsung-Dao Lee, University Professor at Columbia and a student of Fermi's at the University of Chicago from 1946 to 1949. Lee was part of a group of distinguished Italian and American physicists who took part in a conference on Nov. 15 and 16 entitled, "Enrico Fermi and the Beginnings of Nuclear Fission," at Columbia University's Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America to celebrate the the centennial of the birth of Enrico Fermi, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose World War II-era experiments helped lead to the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. Many of the participants, including Nobel Prize winners Lee and Willis Lamb, worked with Fermi at Columbia, the University of Chicago or Los Alamos and provided personal accounts of their experiences with Fermi. The event highlighted Fermi's breakthrough experiments and his impact on science and culture, including nuclear medicine, fission as an energy source and government funding of science research.
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While studying the creation of artificially radioactive isotopes in the 1930s, Enrico Fermi became the first physicist to split the atom. His later research pioneered nuclear power generation. Fermi is considered one of the most important architects of the nuclear age.
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The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, b. Sept. 29, 1901, d. Nov. 28, 1954, is best known as a central figure in the Manhattan project to build the first atomic bomb. Fermi received his doctorate from the University of Pisa in 1922. After working under Max Born at Gottingen and Paul Ehrenfest at Leiden, he returned to Italy in 1926 and became professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome. In 1938, on the eve of World War II, he escaped to the United States.
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Enrico Fermi, winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize in physics, is known to the public primarily for his role in producing the first controlled nuclear-chain reaction at the University of Chicago during the Manhattan Project in 1942. But he ... made major contributions to the statistics of electron gas, the statistical model of the atom itself, to the understanding of radioactivity, and influenced a whole new generation of physicists. Special events to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Fermi’s birth will be held in Rome and Pisa, Italy, as well as the University of Chicago, Columbia University in New York City, and at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. The U.S. Postal Service, meanwhile, will issue a stamp in Fermi’s honor.
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Physicist Enrico Fermi