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Enrico Fermi

"Enrico Fermi." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 05 Nov. 2008 .
"Enrico Fermi." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 3 Nov 2008, 23:39 UTC. 5 Nov 2008 .
"Enrico Fermi." Who2? Biographies. Who2?, 2008. Answers.com 05 Nov. 2008. http://www.answers.com/topic/enrico-fermi.
"Enrico Fermi." History of Science and Technology. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. Answers.com 05 Nov. 2008. http://www.answers.com/topic/enrico-fermi.

Enrico Fermi
Enrico Fermi was born in Rome on 29th September, 1901, the son of Alberto Fermi, a Chief Inspector of the Ministry of Communications, and Ida de Gattis. He attended a local grammar school, and his early aptitude for mathematics and physics was recognized and encouraged by his father's colleagues, among them A. Amidei. In 1918, he won a fellowship of the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. He spent four years at the University of Pisa, gaining his doctor's degree in physics in 1922, with Professor Puccianti.
Soon afterwards, in 1923, he was awarded a scholarship from the Italian Government and spent some months with Professor Max Born in Göttingen. With a Rockefeller Fellowship, in 1924, he moved to Leyden to work with P. Ehrenfest, and later that same year he returned to Italy to occupy for two years (1924-1926) the post of Lecturer in Mathematical Physics and Mechanics at the University of Florence.
In 1926, Fermi discovered the statistical laws, nowadays known as the «Fermi statistics», governing the particles subject to Pauli's principle (now referred to as «fermions», in contrast with «bosons» which obey the Bose-Einstein statistics).
In 1927, Fermi was elected Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Rome (a post which he retained until 1938, when he - immediately after the receipt of the Nobel Prize - emigrated to America, primarily to escape Mussolini's fascist dictatorship).
During the early years of his career in Rome he occupied himself with...