When studying physics, Enrico Fermi was in his element.

So much so, he has an element named after him.

That would be fermium, the 100th element, called that in his honor by admiring colleagues.

He is the namesake of the Fermi Institute on the campus of the University of Chicago, the Enrico Fermi Award given by the Energy Department, Fermilabs in Illinois and a street in Rome.

Time magazine selected Fermi as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. He won the Nobel Prize in physics.

So why isn't he a household name?

Despite the peer recognition and scores of accolades he received, he still is relatively unknown.

Undeservedly so, because Enrico Fermi (1901-54) is one of the most important figures in science history.

Due to the times in which he lived and the projects on which he worked, a case can be made that he ranks among the most important people in history, period.

Fermi was one of the chief architects of the atomic bomb that helped win World War II for the Allies and spawned public consciousness of the positives and negatives of nuclear energy.

An Rome native, Fermi was the youngest of three children born to railroad official Alberto Fermi and his wife, Ida.

Enrico and his sister, Maria, and brother, Giulio, had seemingly uneventful childhoods until tragedy struck when Enrico was 14.

Giulio — with whom Enrico had a close-knit relationship — was hospitalized for what was expected to be routine surgery for a throat abscess. But when Giulio was receiving anesthesia, he died.

A Turn To Books

His brother's death devastated Enrico and cast a pall over his family. Young Fermi was inconsolable.

Seeking a diversion from his sorrow, he was browsing through bookstalls at a Rome market when he stumbled across two elementary physics texts written in the 1840s by a Jesuit priest.

Intrigued, he bought the books and soon read them straight through, apparently — as he later told his sister — not noticing they were written in Latin.

Fermi's newfound interest was further encouraged when his father's friend gave him books on physics and mathematics, which he absorbed and assimilated.

From that point, Fermi was consumed by physics, attracted by the cathartic certainty it provided in a world suddenly made uncertain by his brother's death.

Contributing to Fermi's intellectual awakening was a friendship he formed with Enrico Persico, another scientifically inclined student. The two joined in such projects as building gyroscopes and measuring the magnetic field of Earth. The two fed each other's curiosity, each answer leading to another question.

When Fermi was 17, he applied to the prestigious University of Pisa. The essay to his entrance exam was so advanced that the examiner told him it would have been suitable for a doctoral student.

By 1920, the 19-year-old Fermi was teaching his teachers, raising eyebrows as an undergraduate at Pisa with the depth of his theoretical work.

By 1922, four years after entering the university, Fermi not only had his undergraduate degree, but also had indeed received his doctorate.

Fermi already was making waves in scientific circles. At 24, he became a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome and assembled a group of first-class young talent for the task of reviving Italian physics.

Judging him infallible, his team called him "the Pope."

In the early 1930s, Fermi and his team began experiments in which they bombarded elements with neutrons. Fermi did not realize until later that he had succeeded in splitting the uranium atom. For this work, Fermi won the Nobel Prize.

The call from Nobel officials in Stockholm, Sweden, may have been a lifesaver for Fermi and his family. A few months earlier, Italy's fascist government, led by Benito Mussolini, implemented anti-Semitic laws.

Although Fermi was Catholic, his wife, Laura — whom he married in 1928 — was Jewish. After he received his prize at a ceremony in Stockholm, he, Laura, son Giulio and daughter Nella emigrated to New York City, where Fermi became a physics professor at Columbia University.

At the time, it was known that nuclear fission — the splitting of an atom — had taken place in Fermi's and others' experiments.

When World War II began in 1939, scientists believed that the great amount of energy released by fission might be applied to build an atomic bomb. The ability to produce such a bomb was crucial in tilting the balance of world power.

Known for his cool and willingness to work with other scientists, Fermi was tabbed to help lead the U.S. nuclear effort, called the Manhattan Project. He moved his family in 1942 to the University of Chicago, the center of bomb development.

One of Fermi's strengths was his dislike of pretension and his preference for simplicity in explaining his work and understanding the work of colleagues.

"(He had a) passion for clarity," American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, also a Manhattan Project participant, wrote about Fermi. "He was simply unable to let things be foggy. Since they always are, this kept him pretty active."

The atomic bomb was successfully tested in 1944 in Los Alamos, N.M.

In August 1945, the U.S. military dropped the weapon on Japan — first Hiroshima, then Nagasaki, razing both cities and quickly ending World War II.

Although he gave the Manhattan Project his full effort and was aware of the possible good created by unlocking nuclear energy, Fermi fretted over the destructive power of the nuclear bomb, a weapon that could kill millions of people in one swift blast.

His primary interest was not weapon making, but the advancement of physics.

"After he sat in on one of the first conferences (in Los Alamos), he turned to me and said, 'I believe your people actually want to make a bomb,' " Oppenheimer said. "I remember his voice sounded surprised."

In 1949, Fermi was among scientists who unsuccessfully argued against development of the hydrogen bomb, even deadlier than the warheads dropped on Japan.

"The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole," wrote Fermi and physicist Isidor Rabi.

Facing His Fate

After World War II, Fermi accepted a professorship at the University of Chicago's Institute for Nuclear Studies, a position he held until he died at 53 from stomach cancer on Nov. 28, 1954.

"Ten days before Fermi had died he told me, 'I hope it won't take long.' He had reconciled himself perfectly to his fate," physicist Eugene Wigner said soon after Fermi's death.

Fermi left a legacy of discovery that stretches to today and beyond.

"There are two possible outcomes," Fermi said about experimentation. "If the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery."

BY JOHN WOOLARD