Fermi, Enrico
Fermi, Enrico (1901–1954), one of the foremost physicists of the twentieth century.Enrico Fermi was born in Rome and educated at the University of Pisa in Italy (Ph.D., 1922), and subsequently at the universities of Gottingen (Germany), Leiden (Holland), and Michigan (United States). In 1926, he made his first major discovery of quantum statistics (now known as Fermi‐Dirac statistics). He accepted an appointment to Columbia University in 1939 and from there verified that nuclear fission was possible. The potential applications of this enterprise were immediately evident to the military. At the request of the U.S. government, Fermi took his research team to the University of Chicago, where in December 1942 they demonstrated the first self‐sustaining chain reaction. Fermi's discoveries and his ability to apply them made him a key player in the development of the Manhattan Project, the highly classified...
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