Lise Meitner

📍27 Kaiser-Josef-Straße, Leopoldstadt, Vienna 1020, Austria

“I was born Elise Meitner in Vienna in 1878, the third of eight children of a Jewish family, and Vienna — the Vienna of fin-de-siècle intellectual brilliance — was where I grew up and where my love of physics was formed. Women were not admitted to the University of Vienna until 1897, and I used the intervening years studying privately before completing my doctorate in 1906 — only the second woman to do so at Vienna. I then went to Berlin to study with Max Planck, who initially refused to admit women to his lectures, and spent thirty years there in the most productive period of my scientific life. I discovered the element protactinium with Otto Hahn and worked for decades on nuclear physics. It was my theoretical explanation of Hahn's experimental results in 1938 that constituted the discovery of nuclear fission — a discovery for which Hahn alone received the Nobel Prize. I was never nominated.”

Sources: Sime, R. Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics (1996), University of California Press; Rife, P. Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (1999), Birkhäuser; Crawford, E. et al. Hahn and Meitner (1997), Physics Today