Lise Meitner (nov 7, 1878 – oct 27, 1968)

Description:

Lise Meitner (November 7, 1878 – October 27, 1968), Physicist

Life:
Lise Meitner is the second woman in the world to earn a doctorate in physics. Meithner was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who contributed to the discoveries of protactinium and the nuclear fission.

Contributions to Science:
After her doctorate she joined Otto Hahn in research on radioactivity. She and Hahn were among the first to isolate the radioactive isotope protactinium-231. She along with Otto Hahn discovered nuclear fission. Meitner received many awards and honours late in her life, but she did not share the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for nuclear fission which was awarded to Otto Hahn. According to the Nobel Prize archive, she was nominated 19 times for Nobel Prize in Chemistry between 1924 and 1948, and 29 times for Nobel Prize in Physics between 1937 and 1965. Meitner was the one who told Hahn and Strassman to test their radium in more detail and it was she who told Hahn that it was possible for the nucleus of uranium to disintegrate. Without these contributions of Meitner, Hahn would not have found that the uranium nucleus can split in half. At the time Meitner herself wrote in a letter, "Surely Hahn fully deserved the Nobel Prize for chemistry. There is really no doubt about it. But I believe that Frisch and I contributed something not insignificant to the clarification of the process of uranium fission—how it originates and that it produces so much energy and that was something very remote to Hahn."
Meitner was also praised by Albert Einstein as the German “Marie Curie”. She received the woman of the year award in 1946 from the US National Press Club and had dinner with the US president Harry S. Truman. Due to her academic achievements in nuclear fission and the discovery of protactinium made her a celebrity where she was called on many radio shows around the globe after World War I.

Death:
Meitner died a natural death in 1968 at the age of 89. Her headstone reads “Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity.”

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