Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner (November 7, 1878 – October 27, 1968) was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who conducted pioneering research in radioactivity and nuclear physics. Born in Vienna to a Jewish family, she studied physics at the University of Vienna and later worked alongside Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin, establishing herself as a leading figure in nuclear research during the early 20th century. Her theoretical work was crucial to understanding the splitting of the uranium nucleus—a phenomenon that would become known as nuclear fission. Following the rise of the Nazi regime, she fled Germany in 1938 and eventually settled in Sweden. Working with her nephew Otto Frisch, she provided the theoretical explanation for the fission process discovered experimentally by Hahn and Strassmann. Despite her fundamental contributions, she was notably excluded from the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded for the fission discovery, a significant omission that highlighted the gender discrimination prevalent in scientific institutions at the time. Her legacy remains central to nuclear physics, and she is widely recognized as one of the 20th century's most important scientists.