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Lise Meitner ( LEE-zə MYTE-nər, German: [ˈliːzə ˈmaɪtnɐ] ; born Elise Meitner, 7 November 1878 – 27 October 1968) was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who was one of those responsible for the discovery of the element protactinium and nuclear fission. While working on radioactivity at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in Berlin, she discovered the radioactive isotope protactinium-231 in 1917. In 1938, Meitner and her nephew, the physicist Otto Robert Frisch, discovered nuclear fission. She was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie". Completing her doctoral research in 1905, Meitner became the second woman from the University of Vienna to earn a doctorate in physics. She spent most of her scientific career in Berlin, Germany, where she was a physics professor and a department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute; she was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany. She lost these positions in the 1930s because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany, and in 1938 she fled to Sweden, where she lived for many years, ultimately becoming a Swedish citizen. In mid-1938, Meitner with chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute found that bombarding thorium with neutrons produced different isotopes. Hahn and Strassmann later in the year showed that isotopes of barium could be formed by bombardment of uranium. In late December, Meitner and Frisch worked out the physics of such a splitting process. In their report in February issue of Nature in 1939, they gave it the name "fission". This principle led to the development of the first atomic bomb during World War II, and subsequently other nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors. Meitner did not share the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for nuclear fission, which was awarded exclusively to her long-time collaborator Otto Hahn. Several scientists and journalists have called her exclusion "unjust". According to the Nobel Prize archive, she was nominated 19 times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry between 1924 and 1948, and 30 times for the Nobel Prize in Physics between 1937 and 1967. Despite not having been awarded the Nobel Prize, Meitner was invited to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1962. She received many other honours, including the naming of chemical element 109 meitnerium in 1997 after her death. Early years Meitner was born Elise Meitner on 7 November 1878 into a Jewish upper-middle-class family at the family home in 27 Kaiser Josefstraße in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna, the third of eight children of chess master Philipp Meitner and his wife Hedwig. The birth register of Vienna's Jewish community lists her as being born on 17 November 1878, but all other documents list her date of birth as 7 November, which is what she used. Her father was one of the first Jewish lawyers admitted to practice in Austria. She had two older siblings, Gisela and Auguste (Gusti), and four younger: Moriz (Fritz), Carola (Lola), Frida and Walter; all ultimately pursued an advanced education. Her father was a confirmed freethinker, and she was brought up as such. As an adult, she converted to Christianity, following Lutheranism, and was baptised in 1908; her sisters Gisela and Lola converted to Catholic Christianity that same year. She also adopted a shortened name "Lise". Education Meitner's earliest research began at age eight, when she kept a notebook of her records underneath her pillow. She was particularly drawn to mathematics and science, and first studied colours of an oil slick, thin films, and reflected light. Women were not allowed to attend public institutions of higher education in Vienna until 1897, and she completed her final year of school in 1892. Her education included bookkeeping, arithmetic, history, geography, science, French and gymnastics. The only career available to women was teaching, so she trained as a French teacher. Her sister Gisela passed the Matura, and entered medical school in 1900. In 1899, Meitner began taking private lessons with two other young women, cramming the missing eight years of secondary education into just two. Physics was taught by Arthur Szarvasy. In July 1901, the girls sat an external examination at the Akademisches Gymnasium. Only four out of fourteen girls passed, including Meitner and Henriette Boltzmann, the daughter of physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. Meitner entered the University of Vienna in October 1901. She was particularly inspired by Boltzmann, and was said to often speak with contagious enthusiasm of his lectures. Her dissertation was supervised by Franz Exner and his assistant Hans Benndorf. Her thesis, titled Prüfung einer Formel Maxwells ("Examination of a Maxwell Formula"), was submitted on 20 November 1905 and approved on 28 November. She was examined orally by Exner and Boltzmann on 19 December, and her doctorate was awarded on 1 February 1906. She became the second woman to earn a doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna, after Olga Steindler who had received her degree in 1903; the third was Selma Freud, who worked in the same laboratory as Meitner, and received her doctorate later in 1906. Meitner's thesis was published as Wärmeleitung in inhomogenen Körpern ("Thermal Conduction in Inhomogeneous Bodies") on 22 February 1906. Paul Ehrenfest asked her to investigate an article on optics by Lord Rayleigh that detailed an experiment that produced results that Rayleigh had been unable to explain. She was not only able to explain what was going on; she went further and made predictions based on her explanation, and then verified them experimentally, demonstrating her ability to carry out independent and unsupervised research. While engaged in this research, Meitner was introduced by Stefan Meyer to radioactivity, then a very new field of study. She started with alpha particles. In her experiments with collimators and metal foil, she found that scattering in a beam of alpha particles increased with the atomic mass of the metal atoms. Later on, this led Ernest Rutherford to predict the nuclear atom. She submitted her findings to the Physikalische Zeitschrift on 29 June 1907. Friedrich Wilhelm University Encouraged and backed by her father's financial support, Meitner went to the Friedrich Wilhelm University, where the renowned physicist Max Planck taught. Planck invited her to his home, and allowed her to attend his lectures, which was an unusual gesture by Planck, who was on the record as opposing the admission of women to universities in general, but he was willing to admit that there was the occasional exception; apparently he recognised Meitner as one of the exceptions. She became friends with Planck's twin daughters Emma and Grete, who shared her love of music. Attending Planck's lectures did not take up all her time, and Meitner approached Heinrich Rubens, the head of the experimental physics institute, about doing some research. Rubens said that he would be happy .... Discover the Hilde Herbold popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Hilde Herbold books.