Nuclear physics and radiochemistry · 1878–1968

Lise Meitner

Meitner spent three decades in Berlin in partnership with the chemist Otto Hahn, supplying the physics to his separations, and worked in a converted carpentry workshop in her early years because women were not admitted to the institute proper. Forced to flee Germany in 1938, she was in Sweden when Hahn wrote describing barium among the products of neutron-irradiated uranium; with her nephew Otto Frisch she supplied the interpretation — that the nucleus had split — and estimated the energy released. She was not included in the 1944 Nobel Prize awarded for the discovery.