Named for Enrico Fermi

Fermium honours Enrico Fermi, the physicist who built the first nuclear reactor and was one of the towering figures of twentieth-century physics, and who had died in 1954, shortly before the element's naming was made public. It shares its dramatic birth with einsteinium, both elements condensing out of the hydrogen bomb's flash as light nuclei swallowed neutron after neutron; fermium, at element 100, marks the practical ceiling of that process, for still heavier elements must be built by fusing whole nuclei together rather than by adding neutrons one at a time. Fermium has no ancient or esoteric tradition, being a synthetic element of the atomic age; its name pairs it with einsteinium as a tribute to two of the physicists whose work made the nuclear era, and its discovery, possible.

Fermi had fled Fascist Italy for the United States in 1938, partly because his wife Laura was Jewish and increasingly at risk under Mussolini's racial laws, arriving just in time to lead the team that achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction beneath the stands of a disused football stadium at the University of Chicago in December 1942, the Chicago Pile-1 experiment that opened the reactor age his namesake element's own discovery would later depend on.