Physicist born in 1901 in Rome, Italy. Nobel prize in 1938 for discovering a way to split a uranium atom. Important contributions to quantum physics. Transferred to Columbia University in 1939. Put in charge of the Manhattan Project in Chicago in 1942. Went to Los Alamos to build the bomb. Died of cancer in Chicago in 1954. Fermilab and an institute bear his name.

Worked together with Max Born. He also discovered Fermi Statistics, the statistical laws for governing the elementary particles - Fermions - affected by the Pauli Principle. He was also the brain behind the first controlled nuclear chain reaction.

"for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons"
-- Nobel Prize motivation

Back to Nobel Prizes: Physics
source: http://www.nobel.se

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