Born September 29, 1901

Rome, Italy

Died November 30, 1954

Chicago, Illinois

Nobel Prize–winning physicist

Enrico Fermi. Los Alamos National Laboratory.

"It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge."

Enrico Fermi had a long and illustrious career as a physicist. By the age of twenty-five, he had won international recognition for devising a new statistical method for describing atomic particles. After winning the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1938, Fermi and his family immigrated to the United States to avoid growing political oppression in Italy. Immediately after his arrival in America, Fermi was swept up into what President Harry S. Truman (1884–1972) would later describe as "the battle of the laboratories." World War II (1939–45) was underway and scientists in Nazi Germany and the United States were racing to harness atomic power. Fermi was the first scientist to create an atomic...