Born: 7 November 1878, Austria
Died: 27 October 1968
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Austria, Germany, Sweden, United States
The following is republished from the National Park Service. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Born in Vienna in 1878, Lise Meitner enrolled at the University of Vienna in 1901 and became only the second woman to earn a PhD in Physics from there in 1905. After receiving her PhD, Meitner moved to Berlin, Germany to work with physicist Max Planck and chemist Otto Hahn. Meitner and Hahn would work together for over 30 years; in 1918 they co-discovered the element protactinium.
In 1922, Meitner became the first female full professor of physics at the University of Berlin. In 1926, Meitner began her research on nuclear fission. In 1938, with Nazi Germany seizing power, Meitner fled Berlin, first to the Netherlands and then Stockholm, Sweden. That same year, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann developed evidence of nuclear fission, but it was Meitner and her nephew, physicist Otto Frisch, who theorized that the process resulted from the uranium nucleus splitting in two. Meitner and Frisch were the first to call the process “fission”, and in 1939 they published a scientific paper explaining the process.
In 1942, Meitner was invited to work on the Manhattan Project but adamantly refused, stating “I will have nothing to do with a bomb!” After the war, Meitner continued to avoid any connection to her research and the atomic bomb.
In 1944, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Otto Hahn for his work on nuclear fission; Meitner and Frisch’s contributions were not recognized. After the war, Meitner continued living and working in Sweden, traveling throughout the United States to give lectures. Recognition for her scientific contributions included the Max Planck Medal in 1949 and the Enrico Fermi Award alongside Hahn and Strassmann in 1966. Lise Meitner died in England in 1968.
The following bio was written by Emma Rosen, author of On This Day She Made History: 366 Days With Women Who Shaped the World and This Day In Human Ingenuity & Discovery: 366 Days of Scientific Milestones with Women in the Spotlight, and has been republished with permission.
In 1906, Lise Meitner was awarded a doctorate for her thesis titled “Prüfung einer Formel Maxwells” (“Examination of a Maxwell Formula”). She became the second woman to earn a doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna.
Lise Meitner was born in Vienna in 1878. She was a Jewish-Austrian-Swedish physicist who is mainly known for discovering the radioactive isotope protactinium-231 in 1917 and, in 1938, discovering nuclear fission (with her nephew, the physicist Otto Robert Frisch). Because of Nazi repression, she had to flee Austria. The scientific community (Niels and Margrethe Bohr, Hans Kramers, Adriaan Fokker, Paul Rosbaud, Otto Hahn, Peter Debye, and Dirk Coster) helped her escape to Sweden.
Despite Meitner’s significant contributions to the discovery of nuclear fission, she never received a Nobel Prize, unlike her colleague Otto Hahn, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945.
Meitner died in 1968 in Cambridge, England. In the second image, she teaches the next generation of women’s physicists.
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