Lisa Meitner

Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner was born on November 7, 1878. She was the third of eight children of a Viennese Jewish Family. At a young age she began to notice that her mathematical and physics skills were beyond normal. Lise attended Vienna University in 1901. She received her doctorate degree in 1906. Lise Meitner realizing there would be no work in Vienna she moved to Berlin where she went to the University of Berlin and began her collaborations with Otto Hahn. The first important result of this collaboration was an important technique for purifying radioactive material that took advantage of the recoil energy of atoms produced in alpha decay. Despite only planning on staying in Berlin for a year, she stayed for over thirty. Although she officially retired in 1947, It wasn't until 1960 that she gave up working professionally, having moved to Cambridge, England in...