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Enrico Fermi (1901-54)
Enrico Fermi was born on September 29, 1901 in Rome. He was educated at the University of Pisa, and in 1926 he became a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome. Here, he developed a new idea for explaining the behavior of electrons, and he also developed a theory for beta decay. Fermi bombarded elements with neutrons to produce artificial radioactivity, and he recieved the Nobel Prize in 1938 for this work. Fermi and his family immigrated to the U.S., and he became professor of physics at Columbia University. On December 1942, he created the first nuclear chain reaction under the university's squash court. For the rest of WWII, he worked on the atom bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. After the war was over, Fermi became a professor of physics at the University of Chicago, but he died on November 28, 1954 due to Cancer. |