Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who, working with chemist Otto Hahn for over three decades in Berlin, contributed the theoretical understanding that explained nuclear fission, the splitting of the uranium atoms nucleus that releases the energy nuclear power plants depend on. After being forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1938 because she was Jewish, she and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch worked out, from exile in Sweden, the physical explanation for the experimental results Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had obtained in Berlin, coining the term fission and calculating the enormous energy the process would release. Hahn received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone in 1944 for the discovery, an omission of Meitners contribution now widely regarded as one of the most conspicuous injustices in Nobel Prize history. Element 109, meitnerium, was later named for her in recognition of her role in opening the nuclear age.