Fermi developed a statistical system for quantum mechanics that Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac also arrived at independently, hence the name Fermi-Dirac statistics.
Fermi also proposed a theory for beta-decay. He discovered a method for inducing radioactivity with slow neutrons, though he did not recognize the process as nuclear fission.
Enrico Fermi was born in Rome, Italy. His father was Alberto Fermi, a Chief Inspector of the Ministry of Communications, and his mother was Ida de Gattis, an elementary school teacher. As a young boy he attended local grammar school and enjoyed learning physics and mathematics and shared his interests with his older brother, Giulio.
In 1928 Fermi married Laura Capon, the daughter of an admiral in the Italian navy, The couple had two children - Nella in 1931 and Giulo in 1936.
In 1918 Fermi enrolled at the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he was later to receive his undergraduate and doctoral degree. In order to enter the Institute, candidates had to take an entrance exam which included an essay. For his essay on the given theme Characteristics of Sound, 17-year-old Fermi chose to derive and solve the Fourier analysis based partial differential equation for waves on a string.
In 1921, his third year at the university, he published his first scientific works on the Italian magazine Nuovo Cimento: the first was entitled: "On the dynamic of a solid system of electrical charges in transient conditions"; the second: "On the electrostatic of a uniform gravitational field of electromagnetic charges and on the weight of electromagnetic charges".
In 1923, he was awarded a scholarship from Italian Government and spent some month with Professor Max Born in Gottingen. With a Rockefeller Fellowship, in 1924, he move to Leyden to work with P. Ehrenfest, later return to Italy for the post of lecturer in mathematical Physics and mechanics at the University of Florence.
When he was only 24 years old, Fermi took a professorship at the University of Rome (first in atomic physics in Italy) which he won in a competition held by Professor Orso Mario Corbino, director of the Institute of Physics.
In 1938, Fermi won the Nobel Prize in Physics at the age of 37 for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons.
After Fermi received the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, he, his wife Laura, and their children immigrated to New York to escape the Fascist regime in Italy and its danger to his Jewish wife.
During 1939-42 he served as professor of physics at Columbia University.
After became American citizen and at the end of the war Fermi then went to the University of Chicago, joining the Institute for Nuclear Studies and began studies that led to the construction of the first nuclear pile Chicago Pile-1.
Fermi was widely regarded as the only physicist of the twentieth century who excelled both theoretically and experimentally.
He died of cancer at the University of Chicago on November 28, 1954. Fermi is remembered as the "father of the atomic bomb."
Biography of Enrico Fermi
