Born: 7 November 1878, Austria
Died: 27 October 1968
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Austria, Germany, Sweden, United States
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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