Lise Meitner Lise Meitner was born November 7, 1878 in Vienna, Austria to a Jewish family. Meitner was the third of eight children in her family. She had converted to Protestant, but it had meant nothing since Hitler had taken control. Her parents’ names were Philipp Meitner and Hedwig Skovran Meitner.

Education In 1901, Meitner entered the University of Vienna, studying under Ludwig Boltzmann and right away knew physics was her strongest subject. While there, she only worked as an assistant’s assistant, unpaid. Meitner received her Doctorate degree in By 1907, she was studying with Max Planck at the University of Berlin.

Early Career Meitner worked closely with chemist Otto Hahn. They competed with other foreign groups in gaining results in nuclear physics. They each co-discovered protactinium in In 1923, Meitner discovered a two-electron radiationless transition called the Auger effect, named after Pierre Auger.

Recognition Meitner had been getting some recognition in her work after World War I. She became the first woman professor in Germany and was being paid full wage. Becoming a Physics professor at the University of Berlin, Meitner continued to study isotopes, radioactivity, quantum physics, and much more.

Room for Improvement By 1937, Meitner and her partner had discovered about 9 radioactive elements. Another chemist named Fritz Strassmann joins the duo in their experiments. They decided to see what a nucleus of an atom does if it splits. Instead, the trio splits due to the powerful Nazis at the time.

Moving to Sweden Meitner was forced to escape to Sweden in 1938, but finished working at an institute in Stockholm. She was forced to leave everything back at home, so shse started over from scratch. She met secretly with Hahn for experiments in Copenhagen. Experiments done were inspired by work done by Enrico Fermi.

A Split Atom Meitner, Hahn, and Strassmann combined the atoms radium and barium and somehow the result came out lighter. They did not know that they had split the atom. Meitner explained her observations to her nephew Otto Frisch and named it nuclear fission. Evidence of experimenting with nuclear fission was published in 1939.

Recognition Trouble In 1944, her partner Hahn won a Nobel Prize in Science for discovering nuclear fission. Meitner had helped greatly in this discovery, but was not recognized for it. Meitner had given a well explanation of the splitting of atoms, or nuclear fission. This was the first theoretical explanation of this process.

Late Career Meitner retired from work in 1960 in Cambridge. In 1966, Meitner was partly recognized for helping with nuclear fission. Her, Hahn, and Strassman were awarded the U.S. Fermi Prize. After her death in 1992, the heaviest element ever, element 109 was named Meitnerium in her honor.

Sources mother-of-the-atom-bomb/