American physicist, born in Italy. He studied at Pisa, Gottingen,
and Leiden, and taught physics at the universities of Florence and Rome. He
contributed to the early theory of beta decay and the neutrino and to quantum
statistics. For his experiments with neutrons he was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize
in Physics. Fermi's wife, Laura, was Jewish, and the family did not return to
Fascist Italy after the journey to Stockholm to receive the Nobel award, but
continued on to the United States. Fermi was professor of physics at Columbia
Univ. (1939-45) and at the Univ. of Chicago (1946-54). He created the first
self-sustaining chain reaction in uranium at Chicago in 1942 and worked on the
atomic bomb at Los Alamos. Later he contributed to the development of the hydrogen bomb and served on the General
Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, which named him to receive
its first special award ($25,000) shortly before his death. Fermi was
outstanding as an experimenter, theorist, and teacher. He wrote Elementary
Particles (1951). |
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