Lise Meitner
1878 – 1968 · Austria
Known for: Austrian-Swedish physicist who explained nuclear fission and gave the process its name
“A physicist who never lost her humanity.”
Biography
Elise Meitner was born in Vienna in November 1878, the third of eight children in a Jewish upper-middle-class family of the Leopoldstadt district. Her father, Philipp Meitner, was among the first Jewish lawyers admitted to practice in Austria and a noted chess player; he raised his children as freethinkers and saw that all eight were educated. When Meitner left school in 1892, teaching was the only profession open to women in Vienna, and she qualified as a French teacher. After public higher education was opened to women in 1897, she compressed the missing years of secondary schooling into two years of private study and passed the external matura examination in 1901.
She entered the University of Vienna that October, drawn above all to the lectures of Ludwig Boltzmann, and took her doctorate in physics in 1906, the second woman at the university to do so. In Berlin, where Max Planck admitted her to his lectures at a time when he opposed the admission of women generally, she began a collaboration with the chemist Otto Hahn that lasted three decades. She became a department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry and the first woman to hold a full professorship in physics in Germany. The Nuremberg Laws cost her those positions in 1935, and the annexation of Austria in 1938 cost her citizenship; that July she fled to the Netherlands with the help of Dirk Coster and settled in Stockholm. In December Hahn wrote to her about a result he could not explain: bombarding uranium with neutrons seemed to produce barium. Working with her nephew, the physicist Otto Robert Frisch, she interpreted the data correctly, showing that the uranium nucleus had split, and their report in Nature in February 1939 gave the process its name, fission.
The 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of fission went to Hahn alone, an omission many scientists and writers have since called unjust. Meitner was nominated for the chemistry and physics prizes dozens of times across four decades and received neither, though she was invited to the Lindau meeting of Nobel laureates in 1962. She became a Swedish citizen in 1949 while insisting on keeping her Austrian nationality, continued research in Stockholm, and in the 1950s moved to Britain to be near family. She died in England on 27 October 1968, days before her ninetieth birthday. In 1997 element 109 was named meitnerium in her honour.