US Stamp Honors Fermi

A US stamp to be issued this fall will honor Enrico Fermi on the centennial of his birth.

The stamp shows Fermi in 1948 and a stylized carbon atom—symbolizing graphite, the form of carbon used to slow neutrons in the first nuclear reactor. In December 1942, a team led by Fermi used that pile of uranium and graphite bricks, which was built in a squash court under the University of Chicago’s football stadium, to set off the first ever self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

Born in Italy on 29 September 1901, Fermi was a towering physicist in both experimental and theoretical nuclear and particle physics, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1938. He and his family used the trip to Sweden for the Nobel ceremony to leave Mussolini’s fascist Italy and emigrate to the US, where Fermi joined the faculty at Columbia University and then moved to the University of Chicago to continue his work for the Manhattan Project. He died in 1954.

In other philatelic news, stamps commemorating 100 years of the Nobel Prizes, depicting prize founder Alfred Nobel and medals, were issued in the US and Sweden on 22 March.