for identifying exceptional young people and supporting their development through sustained personal effort.
Rome, 1914. Adolfo Amidei, inspector at the Italian Ministry of Railways, walks home most evenings with a colleague from his office: Alberto Fermi. Often Alberto's thirteen-year-old son Enrico waits for them at the Ministry door and joins the walk.
One evening, having learned that Amidei is well-versed in mathematics and physics, the boy poses him a question. Is it true, he asks, that there exists a branch of geometry in which the important geometric properties are studied without using the concept of measure? Amidei recognises it instantly as projective geometry, and the next day puts into Enrico's hands the Italian translation of Theodor Reye's Die Geometrie der Lage. Two months later the book is returned. There are more than two hundred exercises at the back of it; the boy has solved them all, including several that Amidei himself had found difficult.
Amidei concludes that the child is a prodigy, and begins to procure books for him. Enrico had been buying books haphazardly from the bookstalls of the Campo de' Fiori, hoping to find a theory that would explain the motion of spinning tops and gyroscopes; Amidei tells him the rigorous answer lies in theoretical mechanics, but that mechanics in turn requires trigonometry, algebra, analytic geometry, the calculus. Over the next four years he places before him what amounts to a university education in mathematics — seven volumes, given in sequence.
In 1915 Enrico's elder brother Giulio dies unexpectedly during surgery to remove a throat abscess. The family collapses inward — his mother into prolonged depression, his father into silence. Through this difficult period Amidei continues lending him books.
Two strategic decisions prove decisive. Amidei urges Fermi to learn German, so that he could read the scientific papers being published in that language. This, in the middle of the war with Germany and Austria. And when secondary school ends in July 1918, he persuades the family to send Enrico not to the Sapienza in Rome but to the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. I went immediately to Pisa, Amidei writes later, to obtain all the necessary information and the syllabus for the entrance competition. I returned to Rome to study it with him.
The parents resist. We have already lost Giulio, they tell him, and now for four years we are to be parted from Enrico too, when Rome has an excellent University. Is this right? It requires, Amidei would later record, a saintly patience and much tact to bring them round. They consent. Fermi sits the examination in the autumn of 1918; the President of the Board calls him in, declares he has never met a student like him, predicts a brilliant future, and places him at the head of the list.
Fermi went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938 and to lead the team that produced the first sustained nuclear chain reaction. Amidei went home to his office. He left no scientific publications and no public career outside the civil service; he survives in the historical record almost entirely through Emilio Segrè's biography of Fermi, through Laura Fermi's memoir, and through a single long letter he wrote in November 1958, at Segrè's request, four years after Enrico's death.
This Prize is named for him because he sought nothing for himself and left no record beyond a letter written at another man's request. What he gave was four years of careful attention to a colleague's son. It may have been as consequential as the discoveries that followed.
The honour has two tiers, distinct in scale but identical in spirit. Both recognise the same activity: the patient, often invisible work of identifying an exceptional young person and supporting their development through sustained personal effort.
A prize of $2,500 and a citation honour a single mentor each year. In rare cases of genuine joint mentorship, the Prize is shared. The laureate also receives the Amidei Medal.
The broader recognition. Excellent mentorship is more common than one Prize can honour each year. Each Medallist receives the Amidei Medal, the physical object that marks the honour.
The central operational principle of the Prize, and the only mechanism that surfaces invisible mentors at all. Nominations come from those who were helped, never from the mentors themselves or from third parties.
Someone who guided a single protégé through their formative years and someone who built institutions to do the same at scale are equally eligible. The criterion is universal: mathematics, the sciences, the humanities, the arts, business, sport. Distinction of field does not weigh against the mentor.
The Prize is conferred only on living laureates; the Medal makes no such distinction. Where the mentor has died, it passes to a designated family member, to the protégé, or to an associated institution.
The nominator must have demonstrated sustained excellence in their field — evidenced by major awards or prizes, original contributions of significant impact, or critical roles in distinguished institutions. No single criterion is required; the committee weighs the body of evidence.
Each year ten to twenty new Medallists join those before them. Over the years, this growing body may become more than an annual list. The aspiration is a regular exchange of ideas facilitated through the following two practices:
In time, perhaps not in the first year or the second, Medallists may gather for a day or two around the Prize ceremony. New Medallists are inducted; lectures are given on the work of talent identification and development; the laureate is honoured.
Each year's publication carries the stories of that year's mentors and protégés — in their own words where possible — alongside articles on best practice and current research on talent development. Over decades, the most substantial record of what excellent mentorship actually looks like.
A scholarly programme, dedicated to the recovery of historical Amidei figures and their proper induction, when the research is complete, as posthumous Medallists.
The first project, begun in the inaugural year, is the recovery of Adolfo Amidei himself. Archival work in Rome and at the American Philosophical Society: locating his personnel file, searching for descendants, cataloguing and translating his 1958 letter on Fermi, recovering a portrait if one exists. The aim is the first proper biography of Amidei ever written.
When that work concludes, Amidei will be inducted as the first posthumous Medallist. His descendants receive his medal, the recovered portrait is unveiled, the biography is presented. Subsequent recoveries follow at the programme's own scholarly pace.
If a person — living or no longer with us — saw what you could become and helped you to become it, the Prize exists for you to name them.