Enrico Fermi

Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) was an Italian-American physicist whose work spanned quantum statistics, neutron-induced radioactivity, and the construction of the first sustained nuclear chain reaction. Born in Rome, he completed his doctorate at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa at twenty-one and was appointed to a chair in theoretical physics at the University of Rome in 1926.

That year he published the statistics governing particles obeying the Pauli exclusion principle, now called Fermi-Dirac statistics, and in 1934 he proposed a quantitative theory of beta decay that introduced what became known as Fermi's interaction. With his Roman group he discovered that bombarding nuclei with slow neutrons greatly increased the production of new radioactive isotopes, work that won him the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Travelling to Stockholm to receive the prize, he and his Jewish wife Laura did not return to Mussolini's Italy and emigrated to the United States. At Columbia and then the University of Chicago he led the team that built Chicago Pile-1 beneath the stands of Stagg Field, where on 2 December 1942 he supervised the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

He held a senior role at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project and after the war returned to Chicago, where he trained a generation of postwar physicists and worked on pion-nucleon scattering and on questions in cosmic-ray physics. He died of stomach cancer at fifty-three.

The given name Enrico is the Italian form of Henry, from the Germanic Heimirich, combining heim, meaning home, and rīc, meaning ruler. The surname Fermi is an Italian family name from northern and central Italy. He kept the Italian forms of both names after naturalizing as a United States citizen in 1944.