Happy Birthday. Enrico Fermi!

This month we’re celebrating the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize and best known for having built the first nuclear reactor.

Fermi was born September 29th, 1901, in Rome, Italy. He had an early interest in mathematics and physics, and it was at the market in the Campo de’Fiori in Rome where Fermi found one of his first physics books, Elementorum physicae mathematicae, by Andrea Caraffa. After graduating high school in 1918, Fermi attended the science program at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.

In 1926, at the age of 24, he applied for a professorship at the Sapienza University of Rome, and was appointed in 1927. Fermi received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938 for his work on the artificial radioactivity produced by neutrons, and for nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons. Fermi received the prize in Stockholm but did not return home to Italy, instead continuing on to New York City with his family to begin his post at Columbia University. The decision to move to America and become US citizens was a result of the Antisemitism laws in Italy and threats from the Fascist government toward his wife, Laura, and their children.

In mid-1944, Robert Oppenheimer persuaded Fermi to join the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Fermi was appointed as associate director of the laboratory and placed in charge of F Division, which was named after him. In his spare time, Fermi enjoyed leading hiking and skiing trips around Los Alamos with other physicists. After Los Alamos, Fermi became a professor at the University of Chicago on July 1st, 1945, a position he held until his death in 1954.

Please enjoy these photos of Enrico Fermi and our other favorite scientists. To see more images like the ones we’ve selected type the name of a scientist or locale in the search engine.