Enrico Fermi - Impact and Legacy

Impact and Legacy

Enrico Fermi had been the first to use a neutron to produce the radioactive change of one element to another. On 2 December 1942 he initiated the atomic age with the first self-sustaining chain reaction, after which he became known as "father of the atomic bomb". Michael H. Hart ranked him No. 76 in his list of the most influential figures in history.

• The Fermilab particle accelerator and physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, is named after him.
• The femtometre, a convenient unit of length in dealing with distances inside the atomic nucleus, was coined the "fermi" by Robert Hofstadter in 1956, and is still a term widely used.
• Three nuclear reactor installations have been named after Fermi:
  • Fermi 1 and Fermi 2 nuclear power plants in Newport, Michigan
  • Enrico Fermi Nuclear Power Plant, in Italy
  • RA-1 Enrico Fermi, a research reactor in Argentina.
• Many schools are also named after him, such as the Enrico Fermi High School in Enfield, Connecticut.
• Particles with half-valued spins are called fermions, as they obey the Fermi–Dirac statistics.
• Fermi Court in Deep River, Ontario is named in his honor.
• A synthetic element isolated from the debris of the 1952 Ivy Mike nuclear test was named fermium, in honor of Fermi's contributions to the scientific community. It follows the element einsteinium which was discovered with it.
• Since the 1950s, the United States Atomic Energy Commission has named its highest honor, the Fermi Award, after him. Recipients of the award include well-known scientists like Otto Hahn, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Freeman Dyson, John Wheeler and Hans Bethe.
• In 1976, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
• In 2008, the newly launched Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope was named after him.
• In 2011, Nvidia released a GPU Codenamed "Fermi" named after Enrico Fermi.