Lise Meitner
7 November 1878 – 27 October 1968
Lise Meitner (1878-1968) was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who provided the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission with her nephew Otto Frisch. She worked for three decades with chemist Otto Hahn in Berlin, co-discovering the element protactinium, before fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938. The element meitnerium is named in her honour.
Lived at the same time
Well-documented people whose lives overlapped with Lise Meitner.
- Eileen Gray (1878–1976) Overlapped 90 years →
- Pablo Casals (1876–1973) Overlapped 90 years →
- Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) Overlapped 90 years →
- Otto Hahn (1879–1968) Overlapped 89 years →
- Konrad Adenauer (1876–1967) Overlapped 89 years →
- Periyar E. V. Ramasamy (1879–1973) Overlapped 89 years →
Life events
Lise Meitner was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, the third of eight children of lawyer Philipp Meitner.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgMeitner became only the second woman to receive a physics doctorate from the University of Vienna, with a dissertation on heat conduction supervised under Franz Exner.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgMeitner relocated to Berlin to attend Max Planck's lectures and began a research partnership with chemist Otto Hahn that lasted three decades.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgMeitner and Hahn identified the first long-lived isotope of protactinium, element 91, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgMeitner was made a professor at the University of Berlin, one of the first women to hold such a rank in Germany.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgBecause of her Jewish ancestry, Meitner escaped Germany via the Netherlands and settled in Stockholm, where she joined the Nobel Institute for Physics.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgWith her nephew Otto Frisch, Meitner explained Hahn and Strassmann's barium results as the splitting of the uranium nucleus, coining the term 'fission' in a paper in Nature.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgMeitner shared the United States Enrico Fermi Award with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann for the discovery of nuclear fission.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgMeitner died in Cambridge, where she had retired to be near relatives; her gravestone reads 'A physicist who never lost her humanity'.
Source: en.wikipedia.org