Born: Nov 7, 1878, Vienna
Died: Oct 27, 1968, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England
Lise Meitner was an Austrian-Swedish physicist, who first identified nuclear fission. She was born in Vienna, Austria, and educated at the Universities of Vienna and Berlin. In association with German physical chemist Otto Hahn, she helped discover the element protactinium in 1918, and she was a professor of physics at the University of Berlin from 1926 to 1933. In 1938, she left Germany and went to Sweden to join the atomic research staff at the University of Stockholm. In 1939, Meitner published the first paper concerning nuclear fission. She is also known for her research on atomic theory and radioactivity. In her work, she predicted the existence of chain reaction, which contributed to the development of the atomic bomb (see Nuclear Weapons). In 1946, she was a visiting professor at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and in 1959 she revisited the United States to lecture at Bryn Mawr College. In 1997, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry announced that the chemical element with the atomic number 109 would be given the official name meitnerium (Mt) in her honour.
