| American physicist, born in Italy. He studied at Pisa, Gottingen, and Leiden, and taught physics at the universities of Florence
and Rome. He contributed to the early theory of beta decay and the neutrino and to quantum statistics. For his experiments
with neutrons he was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics. Fermi's wife, Laura, was Jewish, and the family did not return to Fascist
Italy after the journey to Stockholm to receive the Nobel award, but continued on to the United States. Fermi was professor
of physics at Columbia Univ. (1939-45) and at the Univ. of Chicago (1946-54). He created the first self-sustaining chain reaction
in uranium at Chicago in 1942 and worked on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. Later he contributed to the development of the hydrogen bomb and served on the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, which named him to receive its first special
award ($25,000) shortly before his death. Fermi was outstanding as an experimenter, theorist, and teacher. He wrote Elementary
Particles (1951).
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