Meitner lise biography

Lise Meitner was born on November 7, , in Vienna, Austria. The third of eight children of a Jewish family, she entered the University of Vienna in , studying physics under Ludwig Boltzmann. After she obtained her doctorate degree in , she went to Berlin in to study with Max Planck and the chemist Otto Hahn. She worked together with Hahn for 30 years, each of them leading a section in Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. Hahn and Meitner collaborated closely, studying radioactivity, with her knowledge of physics and his knowledge of chemistry. In , they discovered the element protactinium.

In , Meitner discovered the radiationless transition known as the Auger effect, which is named for Pierre Victor Auger, a French scientist who discovered the effect two years later.

After Austria was annexed by Germany in , Meitner was forced to flee Germany for Sweden. She continued her work at Manne Siegbahn's institute in Stockholm, but with little support, partially due to Siegbahn's prejudice against women in science. Hahn and Meitner met clandestinely in Copenhagen in November to plan a new round of experiments. The experiments that provided the evidence for nuclear fission were done at Hahn's laboratory in Berlin and published in January In February , Meitner published the physical explanation for the observations and, with her nephew, physicist Otto Frisch, named the process nuclear fission. The discovery led other scientists to prompt Albert Einstein to write President Franklin D. Roosevelt a warning letter, which led to the Manhattan Project.

In , Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his research into fission, but Meitner was ignored, partly because Hahn downplayed her role ever since she left Germany. The Nobel mistake, never acknowledged, was partly rectified in , when Hahn, Meitner, and Strassman were awarded the Enrico Fermi Award. On a visit to the U.S. in , she was given total American press celebrity treatme

Main achievements: Discovered nuclear fission. First woman in Germany to assume a post of full professor in physics.

Lise Meitner was an Austrian physicist who worked on radioactivity and nuclear physics. Meitner was part of the team that discovered nuclear fission, an achievement for which her colleague Otto Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize. Meitner is often mentioned as one of the most glaring examples of women's scientific achievement overlooked by the Nobel committee. A Physics Today study concluded that Meitner's omission was "a rare instance in which personal negative opinions apparently led to the exclusion of a deserving scientist" from the Nobel. Element , meitnerium, is named in her honour.

Meitner was born into a Jewish family as the third of eight children in Vienna, 2nd district (Leopoldstadt). Her father, Philipp Meitner, was one of the first Jewish lawyers in Austria. Meitner studied physics and became the second woman to obtain a doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna in ("Wärmeleitung im inhomogenen Körper"). Women were not allowed to attend public institutions of higher education in those days, but Meitner was able to achieve a private education in physics in part because of her supportive parents, and she completed in with an "externe Matura" examination at the Akademisches Gymnasium.

In , Meitner became the first woman in Germany to assume a post of full professor in physics, at the University of Berlin. There she undertook the research program in nuclear physics which eventually led to her co-discovery of nuclear fission in , after she had left Berlin. She was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie". In , Meitner taught a seminar on nuclear physics and chemistry with Leó Szilárd. With the discovery of the neutron in the early s, speculat

"I will have nothing to do with a bomb!"

Born in Vienna in , Lise Meitner enrolled at the University of Vienna in and became only the second woman to earn a PhD in Physics from there in 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 they co-discovered the element protactinium. 

In , Meitner became the first female full professor of physics at the University of Berlin. In , Meitner began her research on nuclear fission. In , 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 they published a scientific paper explaining the process. 

In , 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 , 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 and the Enrico Fermi Award alongside Hahn and Strassmann in Lise Meitner died in England in