Short answers, pulled from the story.
Enrico Fermi was an Italian-American physicist who created the world's first artificial nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, and was a member of the Manhattan Project. He has been called the architect of the nuclear age and was one of very few physicists to excel in both theoretical and experimental physics.
Enrico Fermi won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938 at the age of 37, for his demonstrations of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation and for nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons. The new elements were later revealed to be nuclear fission products rather than the transuranic elements he believed he had created.
Chicago Pile-1 went critical on the 2nd of December 1942, demonstrating the first human-created, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Fermi built it in the squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago's Stagg Field, and construction had begun on the 6th of November 1942.
Enrico Fermi left Italy in 1938 to escape new Italian racial laws that threatened his Jewish wife, Laura Capon, and put many of his research assistants out of work. After receiving the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, he continued to New York City with his family in December 1938 and applied for permanent residency.
The Fermi method is a way of getting quick and approximate answers through back-of-the-envelope calculations, and it is widely taught. Fermi used it at the Trinity test on the 16th of July 1945, dropping strips of paper into the blast wave to estimate the bomb's yield.
Enrico Fermi died of inoperable stomach cancer at his home in Chicago on the 28th of November 1954, at the age of 53, fifty days after an exploratory operation at Billings Memorial Hospital. He had suspected that working near the nuclear pile carried great risk but pressed on because he felt the benefits outweighed the danger.
Many things bear Fermi's name, including the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Enrico Fermi Award, and the Fermi paradox. The synthetic element fermium, isolated from the debris of the 1952 Ivy Mike nuclear test, was named in his honor, making him one of 16 scientists who have elements named after them.