Tomorrow will be the 120th birthday of Enrico Fermi, an extraordinary physicist whose impact can still be felt throughout the field, and in many aspects of our daily lives. Born in Rome, he was a child prodigy who had mastered all of classical physics by age 18. He taught himself relativity and quantum theory at university in Pisa, since none of his professors knew enough to teach these subjects. He went on to a lectureship at Florence, where he developed what are now known as Fermi-Dirac statistics,