In addition to the renowned Enrico Fermi, notable faculty included the Nobel laureates Harold Urey and Maria Goeppert Mayer (with whom Dresselhaus lived for about a year as a boarder) as well as the physicist Leona Woods, the only woman present during the famous 1942 fission demonstration on one of the school’s squash courts. These types of questions became known, collectively, as “Fermi problems” and are taught today in schools around the world, from kindergarten all the way to graduate-level courses, as examples of how to estimate and triangulate in search of an answer, even when you don’t know all the relevant—and seemingly necessary—parameters. Indeed, throughout her career, Dresselhaus credited Fermi with teaching her how to “think as a physicist.” A key concept behind the Fermi system, she often stated, was the idea of single-authorship research: Grad students were expected to conceive of, carry out, and publish their thesis work more or less on their own, without the guiding hand of a more senior faculty member.
Author: Maia Weinstock
Published at: 2025-10-21 21:00:00
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