Ettore Majorana
Ettore Majorana (Italian: [ˈɛttore majoˈraːna]; born on 5 August 1906 – probably died after 1959) was an Italian theoretical physicist who worked on neutrino masses. He disappeared suddenly under mysterious circumstances while going by ship from Palermo to Naples. The Majorana equation and Majorana fermions are named after him. In 2006, the Majorana Prize was established in his memory.
Life and work
Gifted in mathematics
Majorana was born in Catania, Sicily. Mathematically gifted, he was very young when he joined Enrico Fermi's team in Rome as one of the "Via Panisperna boys", who took their name from the street address of their laboratory.
His uncle Quirino Majorana was also a physicist.
He began his university studies in engineering in 1923 but switched to physics in 1928 at the urging of Emilio Segrè. His first papers dealt with problems in atomic spectroscopy.
First published academic papers
His first paper, published in 1928, was written when he was an undergraduate and coauthored by Giovanni Gentile, Jr., a junior professor in the Institute of Physics in Rome. This work was an early quantitative application to atomic spectroscopy of Fermi's statistical model of atomic structure (now known as the Thomas–Fermi model, due to its contemporaneous description by Llewellyn Thomas).
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