Lise Meitner Facts
Lise Meitner Facts
|
| Interesting Lise Meitner Facts: |
|---|
| Lisa Meitner was the third of eight children born to a Jewish family in Vienna. |
| In 1905 she became the second woman to earn a PhD in physics at the University of Vienna which was quite an accomplishment since it was unusual for a woman to attend public universities. |
| She was the first woman allowed by Max Planck to attend his lectures and after a year became his assistant. |
| She worked with Otto Hahn at the University of Berlin and in 1909 she presented two papers on beta-radiation. |
| In 1917 she received the Leibniz Medal by the Berlin Academy of Sciences for the discovery of the first long-lived isotope of protactinium. |
| In 1926 she accepted a post at the University of Berlin and became the first woman in Germany to become a full professor of physics. |
| In 1930 she taught with Leo Szilard and explored the possibility of creating elements heavier than uranium in a laboratory. |
| In 1938 he fled Nazi Germany to moved first to the Netherlands and then to Sweden. |
| In Stockholm she worked with Niels Bohr. |
| In a series of experiments she and Otto Frisch discovered the reason no stable element existed in nature beyond uranium. |
| She and Frisch also realized potential energy explained by Einstein's equation, E=mc2 and was the first to correctly identify nuclear fission. |
| When the Manhattan project was started in 1942, Meitner was offered a position but refused to work on a bomb. |
| She remained in Stockholm where she worked at the Nobel Institute for Physics, the Swedish Defence Research Establishment and the Royal Institute of Technology. |
| In 1947 she became a professor at the University College of Stockholm. |
| When Otto Hahn received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1945, many scientists felt that Meitner should have been named a co-recipient and that her omission was proof of gender bias. |
| In 1945 she was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and in 1949 she became a foreign member of the Royal Society in London. |
| In 1946 she was named "Woman of the Year" by the National Press Club and had dinner with the President of the United States. |
| In 1949 she received the Max Planck Medal of the German Physics Society and in 1955 she received the first Otto Hahn Prize of the German Chemical Society. |
| In 1960 she moved to Cambridge, England. |
|
Related Links: Facts Scientists Facts Animals Facts |