Enrico Fermi

Enrico Fermi (29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an an Italian-born, naturalized American physicist particularly known for his work on the development of the first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1, and for his contributions to the development of quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, and statistical mechanics. He was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity.

Fermi is widely regarded as one of the leading scientists of the 20th century, highly accomplished in both theory and experiment. Along withJ. Robert Oppenheimer, he is frequently referred to as "the father of the atomic bomb". He also held several patents related to the use of nuclear power.

In 1918 Fermi enrolled at the 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. The examiner, Prof. Giulio Pittato, interviewed Fermi and concluded that his essay would have been commendable even for a doctoral degree. Enrico Fermi achieved first place in the classification of the entrance exam. During his years at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Fermi teamed up with a fellow student named Franco Rasetti with whom he used to indulge in light-hearted pranks. Later, Rasetti became Fermi's close friend and collaborator. Besides attending the classes, Enrico Fermi found the time to work on his extracurricular activities, particularly with the help of his friend Enrico Persico, who remained in Rome to attend the university. Between 1919 and 1923 Fermi studied general relativity, quantum mechanics and atomic physics.

Several awards, concepts, and institutions are named after Fermi, such as the Enrico Fermi Award, the Enrico Fermi Institute, the Fermi National Accelerator Lab, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station, a type of particles called fermions, thesynthetic element Fermium, and many more.

His knowledge of quantum physics reached such a high level that the head of the Physics Institute, Prof. Luigi Puccianti, asked him to organize seminars about that topic. During this time he learned tensor calculus, a mathematical instrument invented by Gregorio Ricci and Tullio Levi-Civita, and needed to demonstrate the principles of general relativity. In 1921, his third year at the university, he published his first scientific works in the Italian journal Nuovo Cimento: the first was titled: On the dynamics of a solid system of electrical charges in transient conditions; the second: On the electrostatics of a uniform gravitational field of electromagnetic charges and on the weight of electromagnetic charges. At first glance, the first paper seemed to point out a contradiction between the electrodynamic theory and the relativistic one concerning the calculation of the electromagnetic masses. After one year with a work entitled Correction of severe discrepancy between electrodynamic theory and the relativistic one of electromagnetic charges. Inertia and weight of electricity, Enrico Fermi showed the correctness of his paper. This last publication was so successful that it was translated into German and published in the famous German scientific journal Physikalische Zeitschrift.

In 1922 he published his first important scientific work in the Italian journal I Rendiconti dell'Accademia dei Lincei entitled "On the phenomena that happen close to the line of time", where he introduces for the first time the so-called "Fermi coordinates", and proves that when close to the time line, space behaves as a euclidean one. In 1922 Fermi graduated from Scuola Normale Superiore.

In 1923, while writing the appendix for the Italian edition of the book The Mathematical Theory of Relativity by A. Kopff, Enrico Fermi pointed out, for the first time, that hidden inside the famous Einstein equation (E = mc²), there was an enormous amount of nuclear potential energy to be exploited.

Fermi's Ph.D advisor was Luigi Puccianti. In 1924 Fermi spent a semester at the University of Göttingen, and then stayed for a few months in Leiden with Paul Ehrenfest. From January 1925 to the autumn of 1926, he stayed at the University of Florence. In this period he wrote his work on the Fermi–Dirac statistics.