Lise
Meitner
1878-1968
Lise Meitner was the first woman to become
a full professor of physics in Germany, but being
Jewish by birth, she had to flee when the Nazis took over. In 1938, she and her longtime collaborator Otto Hahn co-authored an
influential paper explaining nuclear fission, the process that enabled
the atomic bomb. Hahn was awarded
the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for nuclear fission, but Meitner did not
get to share the prize. They said it was because she was a physicist, not a
chemist, and for no other reason.
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