A gifted teen, Fermi won a scholarship to the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore University in Pisa with an entry essay so impressive it would have been commendable for a doctorate. Fermi was even asked by his teachers to organise his own seminars on quantum physics, as there was nothing they could teach him. Fermi’s skills meant he was largely self-taught, and he graduated with honours in 1922. He went on to win a Rockefeller fellowship, studying under renowned physicist Max Born in Germany, where he also met Albert Einstein. Between 1926 and 1927, Fermi and English physicist Paul Dirac developed new statistics known as Fermi-Dirac statistics, concerned with subatomic particles that obey the Pauli exclusion principle. These particles, now known as fermions, were a monumental contribution to atomic and nuclear physics.