biography
pronunciation:
[fermee]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1901–54)
|
| biography:
| Physicist, born in Rome, Italy. His precocity in physics and mathematics was encouraged by a family friend throughout his education. While a lecturer at the University of Florence (1924–7), he developed a new form of statistical mechanics to explain the theoretical behaviour of atomic particles (1926). At the University of Rome, he and his colleagues split the nuclei of uranium atoms by bombarding them with neutrons, thus producing artificial radioactive substances. For this breakthrough, Fermi received the 1938 Nobel Prize for Physics. Fearing for his Jewish wife because of Mussolini's anti-Semitic legislation, he went directly from the prize presentation in Stockholm to Columbia University, where he became a professor (1939–42). His suggestion to the US Naval Department to develop weapons utilizing atomic chain reactions led to his move to the University of Chicago (1942–54), where he constructed the first American nuclear reactor. On 2 December 1942 he initiated the atomic age with the first self-sustaining chain reaction, after which he became known as ‘father of the atomic bomb’. The element fermium is named for him. |
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