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From Fermi to Dirac

I was just reminded that exactly 100 years ago today, Enrico Fermi wrote this famous letter to Paul Dirac:

That’s why we call them Fermi-Dirac Statistics!

P.S. It seems that Enrico Fermi wasn’t too handy with a typewriter.

This entry was posted on October 25, 2026 at 7:04 pm and is filed under History, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “From Fermi to Dirac”

  1. gangster 112's avatar
    gangster 112 Says:
    November 6, 2026 at 9:21 am

    What a lovely bit of history to mark the centenary. Students learn ‘Fermi-Dirac statistics’ as just a name in the stat-mech chapter, so seeing the actual letter makes the people behind the Pauli principle and electron gases feel real. I share short explainers on topics like this for students at https://phyfundamentals.org and this is a great story to bring into class.

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