Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner
Born	Elise Meitner (1878-11-07)7 November 1878 Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Died	27 October 1968(1968-10-27) (aged 89) Cambridge, England
Resting place	St James' Church, Bramley, Hampshire
Citizenship	Austria (pre-1949) Sweden (post-1949)
Alma mater	University of Vienna (PhD, 1905)
Known for	Discovery of protactinium Discovery of nuclear fission Auger–Meitner effect Meitner–Hupfeld effect
Relatives	Philipp Meitner
Awards	Lieben Prize (1925) Max Planck Medal (1949) Otto Hahn Prize (1955) ForMemRS (1955) Wilhelm Exner Medal (1960) Enrico Fermi Award (1966)
Scientific career
Fields	Nuclear physics radioactivity
Institutions	Kaiser Wilhelm Institute University of Berlin, Manne Siegbahn Laboratory [sv] University College of Stockholm
Thesis	Prüfung einer Formel Maxwells ("Examination of a Maxwell Formula")  (1905)
Doctoral advisor	Franz S. Exner Hans Benndorf
Other academic advisors	Ludwig Boltzmann Max Planck
Doctoral students	Arnold Flammersfeld Kan-Chang Wang Max Delbrück Nikolaus Riehl
Signature

Lise Meitner (/ˈliːzə ˈmaɪtnər/ LEE-zə MYTE-nər, German: [ˈliːzə ˈmaɪtnɐ] ^ⓘ; born Elise Meitner, 7 November 1878 – 27 October 1968) was a Jewish Austrian physicist who was one of those responsible for the discovery of the element protactinium and the discovery of nuclear fission.

Completing her doctoral research in 1905, Meitner became the second woman from the University of Vienna to earn a doctorate in physics. She spent much of her scientific career in Berlin, Germany, where she was a physics professor and a department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin. She was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany. She lost her positions in 1935 because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany. The 1938 Anschluss resulted in the loss of her Austrian citizenship, and on 13–14 July 1938, she fled to the Netherlands with the help of Dirk Coster. She lived in Stockholm, Sweden, for many years, ultimately becoming a Swedish citizen in 1949, but relocated to Britain in the 1950s to be with other family members.

In mid-1938, Meitner and chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry demonstrated that isotopes of barium could be formed by neutron bombardment of uranium. Meitner was informed of their findings by Hahn, and in late December, with her nephew, fellow physicist Otto Robert Frisch, she worked out the physics of this process by correctly interpreting Hahn and Strassmann's experimental data. On 13 January 1939, Frisch replicated the process Hahn and Strassmann had observed. In Meitner and Frisch's report in the February 1939 issue of Nature , they gave the process the name "fission". The discovery of nuclear fission led to the development of atomic bombs during World War II, and subsequently other nuclear weapons, and the invention of nuclear reactors.

Meitner did not share the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for nuclear fission, which was awarded exclusively to her long-time collaborator Otto Hahn. Several scientists and journalists have called her exclusion "unjust". According to the Nobel Prize archive, she was nominated 19 times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry between 1924 and 1948, and 30 times for the Nobel Prize in Physics between 1937 and 1967. Despite not having been awarded the Nobel Prize, Meitner was invited to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1962. She received many other honours, including the posthumous naming of chemical element 109 meitnerium in 1997. Meitner was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie".^[1]