Enrico Fermi was both a brilliant theorist and an unusually gifted experimentalist — a combination of talents seldom found among twentieth-century physicists. Born in 1901 in Rome, Fermi obtained his doctor's degree in physics magna cum laude from the University of Pisa at the age of 21, with a dissertation on x-rays.

After two years of post-doctoral research at Max Born's Institute in Göttingen, and then with Paul Ehrenfest in Leiden, Fermi taught for two years at the University of Florence, where he soon established his reputation by developing what are now known as the Fermi-Dirac statistics. In 1926 he was appointed to a full professorship in physics at the University of Rome, where he quickly gathered around him a group of talented young faculty members and students, who helped him make a name for Rome in the fields of nuclear physics and quantum mechanics...