Death of Enrico Fermi

Enrico Fermi died on 28 November 1954 in Chicago, aged 53. An Italian-American physicist, Fermi was a professor in Rome, where he worked on neutron-induced radioactivity, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938. He left Italy with his Jewish wife shortly after receiving the prize and settled in the United States. At the University of Chicago he led the team that built Chicago Pile-1, the first nuclear reactor, which achieved the first controlled, self-sustaining chain reaction in December 1942. He took part in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. He also developed the theory of beta decay and the statistics of particles now called fermions. The element fermium is named after him.

Open on the timeline