Pre- College Graduation

Enrico Fermi was born on September 29, 1901. He is the son of the Roman couple Alberto and Ida Fermi. His father was an Inspector of the Minisry of Communication. Enrico's talents in mathematics and physics was recognized and aided by his father's colleagues. He then spent four years at the University of Pisa. He recieved his doctorate in physics in 1922.

Graduation through Appointment to Columbia University

http://www.columbia-generalstudies.com/

After graduation Fermi was awardeda scholarship from the Italian Government and spent months with a Professor Max Born in Göttingen. He was also with a Rockerfeller Fellowship in 1924. Then he moved to Leyden to work with another person, P. Ehrenfest. During the years of 1924-1926 he occupied the post of Lecturer in Mathematical Physics and Mechanics at the University of Florence. In 1926 he discovered the statistical laws. These laws are now known as Fermi statistics. This governs the particles that are subject in Pauli's exclusion principle. Pauli's principle is now known as fermions. In 1927 Fermi was to Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Rome. In his early years in Rome he concentrated himself on electrodynamic problems and with theoretical experiments on various spectroscopic phenomena. After Curie and Joliot disovered artificial radioactivity, Fermi demonstrated that nuclear transformation occured in almost every element subjected to neutron bombardment. By doing this work he discoverd slow neutrons. This lead to the discovery of nuclear fission and the production of elements lying beyond what was the Periodic Table of the time. He soon became the Professor of Physics at Columbia University.

Atomic Bomb

The discovery of fission by Hahn and Srassmann urged Fermi to see the possiblity of the emission of secondary neutrons and of a chain reaction. Fermi's determination eventually lead to the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. The reaction took place in Chicago on December 2, 1942. This was five days before the tragic attacks on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. He was one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project. In 1944 Fermi became a United States citizen. At the end of World War Two he accepted a professorship from the Institute for Nuclear Studies of the University of Chicago. This position was held until his death in 1954. While he was there his attention turned to high-energy physics, this lead to the investigations into the pion-nucleon interaction. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on artificial radio

http://www.aip.org/history/esva/exhibits/fermi.htm

http://efi.uchicago.edu/

http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1938/fermi-bio.html

http://www.orcbs.msu.edu/radiation/radhistory/enricofermi.html