Enrico Fermi, 1901-1954

Abstract

The sudden death of Enrico Fermi at the age of 53 has filled physicists all the world over with greatest sadness and consternation. One of the most outstanding and in some respects unique scientific personalities, a wonderful teacher and a marvellous representative of his native country, Italy, has left us. Fermi was born in Rome on 29 September 1901. He was educated at the High School in Rome and later at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa where he obtained a Doctorate in 1922. He later studied at Göttingen with Born and at Leiden with Ehrenfest. From 1924-26 he was Lecturer in Mathematical Physics at Florence. In 1927 he was elected to a Professorship of Theoretical Physics in Rome and in 1929 became one of the Founder Members of the Royal Academy of Italy. Fermi’s early work was mostly concerned with theory, often with problems which arose from the advent of the new mechanics of Heisenberg, Dirac and Schrodinger. One group of investigations dealt with spectroscopy: the anomaly of the intensity ratio of the multiplets of the higher alkali metals, the magnetic moments of nuclei, calculations of spectra of ions, the Raman effect in CO 2 and in crystals, the oscillations and rotations of the NH 3 molecule and the hyperfine structure separation