Enrico Fermi

Fermi won the 1938 Nobel Prize for his work on neutron-induced radioactivity. The Stockholm ceremony in December of that year doubled as his escape route: Mussolini's racial laws had endangered Fermi's Jewish wife Laura, and the family went directly from the ceremony to a steamer for New York. He joined Columbia, then the University of Chicago. On 2 December 1942, under the stands of the disused Stagg Field, Fermi's team achieved the first sustained nuclear chain reaction in Chicago Pile-1. Coded telephone message to Washington: "The Italian navigator has landed in the New World." After the war he founded the Chicago Institute for Nuclear Studies and trained much of the next generation of American physicists. He died of stomach cancer at fifty-three.