It's safe to say that Enrico Fermi's discovery changed the world.

Fermi was a professor of physics at the University of Chicago from 1941 until his death in 1954.

He received a Nobel prize in 1938 for demonstrating the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons.

The discovery led, on Dec. 2, 1942, to Fermi and a team of scientists achieving the first controlled self-sustained nuclear chain reaction on the U of C campus, which initiated the modern nuclear age.

The chain reaction was part of the Manhattan Project, a secret wartime project to develop nuclear weapons.

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