Enrico Fermi
September 29, 1901 – November 28, 1954
Italian-American physicist who built the first nuclear reactor (Chicago Pile-1, 1942).
Biography
Enrico Fermi studied in Pisa and became a professor of theoretical physics in Rome in 1926. He developed the statistics that describe particles such as electrons and a theory of beta decay, and in 1934 he showed that slow neutrons could induce radioactivity in many elements.
He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938 and used the trip to Stockholm to leave Fascist Italy, whose new racial laws threatened his Jewish wife. He settled in the United States.
At the University of Chicago he led the team that built Chicago Pile-1, which achieved the first controlled nuclear chain reaction on 2 December 1942. He then worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project. After the war he returned to Chicago and trained many leading physicists. He died of cancer in 1954.
Affiliations
Employment
- Jan 1, 1924 – Jan 1, 1926 University of Florence
- Jan 1, 1926 – Jan 1, 1938 Sapienza University of Rome
- Jan 1, 1939 – Jan 1, 1942 Columbia University
- Jan 1, 1942 – Jan 1, 1954 University of Chicago
- University of Göttingen
- Leiden University
- Enrico Fermi Institute
Party membership
- from Apr 27, 1929 National Fascist Party Joined the National Fascist Party on 27 April 1929, a month after appointment to the Royal Academy of Italy; later opposed Fascism over the 1938 racial laws.
