Ettore Majorana

Early and personal life
Majorana was born in Catania, Sicily. Majorana's uncle Quirino Majorana was also a physicist. Mathematically gifted, Majorana began his university studies in engineering in 1923, but switched to physics in 1928 at the urging of Emilio Segrè. 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.
Majorana was an enthusiastic and devout Catholic.

First published academic papers

Majorana's first papers dealt with problems in atomic spectroscopy. His first paper, published in 1928, was written when he was an undergraduate and it was coauthored by Giovanni Gentile, Jr., a junior professor at 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).
In this paper, Majorana and Gentile performed first-principles calculations within the context of this model that gave a good account of experimentally-observed core electron energies of gadolinium and uranium, and of the fine structure splitting of caesium lines observed in optical spectra. In 1931, Majorana published the first paper on the phenomenon of autoionization in atomic spectra, which he called "spontaneous ionization"; an independent paper in the same year, published by Allen Shenstone of Princeton University, called it "auto-ionization", a name first used by Pierre Auger. This name, without the hyphen, has since become the conventional term for the phenomenon.
Majorana earned his Laurea in physics at the University of Rome La Sapienza in 1929. In 1932, he published a paper in the field of atomic…

Reportedly, Majorana had withdrawn all of his money from his bank account prior to making a trip from Naples to Palermo. He may have traveled to Palermo hoping to visit his friend Emilio Segrè, a professor at the university there, but Segrè was in California at that time.

On the day of his disappearance, Majorana sent the following note from Palermo to Antonio Carrelli, director of the Naples Physics Institute:Dear Carrelli,I made a decision that has become unavoidable. There isn't a bit of selfishness in it, but I realize what trouble my sudden disappearance will cause you and the students. For this as well, I beg your forgiveness, but especially for betraying the trust, the sincere friendship, and the sympathy you gave me over the past months.I ask you to remember me to all those I learned to know and appreciate in your Institute, especially Sciuti: I will keep a fond memory of them all at least until 11 pm tonight, possibly later too. — E. Majorana
This was followed rapidly by a telegram from Majorana cancelling earlier travel plans. Apparently, he then bought a ticket to travel by ship from Palermo to return to Naples. He was never seen again.

Investigations and hypotheses

Italian writer Leonardo Sciascia has summarized some of the results of investigations and hypotheses about the disappearance; however, some of Sciascia's conclusions were refuted by some of Majorana's former colleagues, including E. Amaldi and E. Segrè. Recami critically examines various hypotheses about Majorana's disappearance, including those advanced by Sciascia, and presents suggestive evidence for the proposal that Majorana travelled to Argentina.
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben published a book in 2016 that examines the case of Majorana's disappearance.

Proposed…

The year 2006 marked Majorana's centenary.
An international conference on "Ettore Majorana's legacy and the Physics of the XXI century" was held in commemoration of the centennial of Majorana's birth in Catania, 5–6 October 2006. The conference proceedings with articles of highly ranked international scientists A. Bianconi, D. Brink, N. Cabibbo, R. Casalbuoni, G. Dragoni, S. Esposito, E. Fiorini, M. Inguscio, R. W. Jackiw, L. Maiani, R. Mantegna, E. Migneco, R. Petronzio, B. Preziosi, R. Pucci, E. Recami, and Antonino Zichichi have been published by POS Proceedings of Science of SISSA, edited by Andrea Rapisarda (chairman), Paolo Castorina, Francesco Catara, Salvatore Lo Nigro, Emilio Migneco, Francesco Porto, and Emanuele Rimini.
A commemorative book of his nine collected papers, with commentary and English translations, was published by the Italian Physical Society in 2006.
Also to commemorate the centenary, the Electronic Journal of Theoretical Physics (EJTP) published a special issue of twenty articles dedicated to the modern development of Majorana's legacy. The EJTP also established a prize in his memory to mark his centenary. The Majorana Medal or Majorana Prize is an annual prize for researchers who have shown peculiar creativity, critical sense, and mathematical rigour in theoretical physics—in its broadest sense. The recipients of the 2006 Majorana Prize were Erasmo Recami (University of Bergamo and INFN) and George Sudarshan (University of Texas); of the 2007 Majorana Prize: Lee Smolin (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canada), Eliano Pessa (Centro Interdipartimentale di Scienze Cognitive, Università di Pavia and Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università di Pavia Piazza Botta, Italy) and Marcello Cini (Dipartimento di Fisica, Università La Sapienza,…