Enrico Fermi

@Nobel Laureate in Physics, Family and Personal Life

Enrico Fermi was an Italian physicist who made major contributions to the development of nuclear energy

Sep 29, 1901

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Biography

Personal Details

  • Birthday: September 29, 1901
  • Died on: November 28, 1954
  • Nationality: Italian, American
  • Famous: Nobel Laureate in Physics, Scientists, Physicists
  • Spouses: Laura Fermi
  • Siblings: Giulio, Maria
  • Childrens: Giulio Fermi, Nella Fermi

Enrico Fermi born at

Rome, Italy

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Birth Place

He married Laura Capon in 1928. She was a science student at the University of Rome. The couple had two children.

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Personal Life

Fermi became ill with stomach cancer and died on November 28, 1954, leaving the world shattered at his untimely death.

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Personal Life

He was born on 29 September 1901 as the third child of Alberto Fermi and Ida de Gattis, in Rome, Italy. His father worked as a division head in the Ministry of Railways while his mother was an elementary school teacher. He had one brother and one sister.

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Childhood & Early Life

He was interested in science from a young age, a passion he shared with his brother. The boys used to play with electrical toys and built electric motors together. Unfortunately his brother died when just in his teens.

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Childhood & Early Life

As a boy he derived most of his physics knowledge from a book called ‘Elementorum physicae mathematicae’ which covered mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, and acoustics.

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Childhood & Early Life

Recognizing his interest in physics, his father’s friend gave him several books on physics and mathematics to whet his curiosity.

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Childhood & Early Life

He graduated from high school in 1918 and applied to the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. The institute held a difficult entrance examination and Fermi submitted an essay on the partial differential equation which secured him the first place in the exam and quickly elevated him to the doctoral program.

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Childhood & Early Life

He returned to Italy in 1924 and was appointed as a Lecturer in Mathematical Physics and Mechanics at the University of Florence, a post he held for the next two years.

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Career

He landed a position as a professor at the Sapienza University of Rome in 1927. This was a new chair created at the urging of Professor Orso Mario Corbino in an attempt to raise the standard of physics in Italy.

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Career

Fermi was assisted by Corbino in building his team of budding physicists. He appointed his old friend Franco Rasetti as his assistant and they recruited talented students like Emilio Segre, Ettore Majorana, and Edoardo Amaldi.

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Career

Working together, Fermi and his team conducted research on many practical and theoretical aspects of physics. In 1928, he published ‘Introduction to Atomic Physics’ which went on to become an informative text for university students in Italy.

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Career

He was completely dedicated to spreading knowledge of physics and gave several public lectures to promote this subject. Soon his fame spread around the world and foreign students started coming to Italy to study. The budding German physicist Hans Bethe was one of them.

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Career

He is best known for his work on induced radioactivity which occurs when a previously stable material has been made radioactive by exposure to specific radiation. He supervised the first man-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction that was initiated in Chicago Pile -1 in December 1942.

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Major Works