Lise Meitner | |
|---|---|
 Meitner, c. 1960 | |
| Born | Elise Meitner 7 November 1878 |
| Died | 27 October 1968 (aged 89) Cambridge, England |
| Resting place | St James' Church, Bramley, Hampshire |
| Citizenship |
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| Alma mater | University of Vienna (PhD) |
| Known for | |
| Father | Philipp Meitner |
| Relatives | Otto Robert Frisch (nephew) |
| Awards |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Nuclear physics |
| Institutions | |
| Thesis | Prüfung einer Formel Maxwells ("Examination of a Maxwell Formula") (1905) |
| Doctoral advisors | Hans Benndorf Franz S. Exner |
| Other academic advisors | |
| Signature | |
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Lise Meitner (/ˈliːzə ˈmaɪtnər/ LEE-zə MYTE-nər, German: [ˈliːzə ˈmaɪtnɐ] ; born Elise Meitner, 7 November 1878 – 27 October 1968) was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who was instrumental in the discoveries of nuclear fission and protactinium.
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, where she was a physics professor and a department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. 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, and the 1938 Anschluss resulted in the loss of her Austrian citizenship. On 13–14 July 1938, she fled to the Netherlands with the help of Dirk Coster. She lived in Stockholm for many years, ultimately becoming a Swedish citizen in 1949, but relocated to Britain in the 1950s to be with 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 and nuclear reactors during World War II.
Meitner did not share the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for nuclear fission, which was awarded 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 element 109 meitnerium in 1997. Meitner was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie."[1]