The Last Man Who Knew Everything

The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age

David N. Schwartz Hillsdale BIOGRAPHY 530.092 FERMI 2017


Interesting reading. Enrico Fermi was a remarkable man who wrote little about himself and his motivations. Shwartz wrote about what Fermi did and said, little about what he thought.

Fermi was an excellent mathematician and good at approximation and teaching. Mussolini and Hitler frightened away the best minds of Europe; Fermi's wife Laura Capon was ethnically Jewish, and the couple fled to America (after Fermi received the 1938 Nobel Prize) to protect her. Fermi ended up at Columbia, where he designed and tested the first subcritical atomic piles. The physicists and the experiments moved to Chicago in 1942. Laura moving into their house at 5537 South Woodlawn in September 1942.

Fermi (last edited 2019-12-04 05:13:44 by KeithLofstrom)