For the second half of his scholarship, Bethe chose to go to Enrico Fermi 's laboratory in Rome in February 1931. He was greatly impressed by Fermi and regretted that he had not gone to Rome first. Bethe developed the Bethe ansatz, a method for finding the exact solutions for the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of certain one-dimensional quantum many-body models. He was influenced by Fermi's simplicity and Sommerfeld's rigor in approaching problems and these qualities influenced his own later research.