Orso Mario Corbino

Orso Mario Corbino was an Italian physicist and politician. He served as the minister for education in 1921 and as the minister for economy in 1921. He also served as professor in Messina (1905) and in Rome (1908). He is noted for his studies of the influence of external magnetic fields on the motion of electrons in metals and he discovered the Corbino effect. Corbino worked with Damiano Macaluso where they discovered the Macaluso-Corbino effect, a strong magneto-rotation of the plane of polarization observed at wavelengths close to an absorption line of the material through which the light is travelling. As director of the Institute of physics he was the supervisor of Enrico Fermi, Edoardo Amaldi, Franco Rasetti and Emilio Segrè, Bruno Pontecorvo, Oscar D'Agostino, Ettore Majorana.