She was born Elise Meitner on 7 November 1878 into a Jewish upper-middle-class family at the family home in 27 Kaiser Josefstrasse in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna, the third of eight children of Hedwig and Philipp Meitner. The birth register of Vienna's Jewish community lists her as being born on 17 November 1878, but all other documents list her date of birth as 7 November, which is what she used. She shortened her name from Elise to Lise. Her father was one of the first Jewish lawyers admitted to practice in Austria. She had two older siblings, Gisela and Auguste (Gusti), and five younger: Moriz (Fritz), Carola (Lola), Frida and Walter; all eight, including the five girls, ultimately pursued an advanced education.
Early years
Lise Meitner
Lise Meitner | Early years
In the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna Vienna Austria 27 Kaiser Josefstrasse in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna
who was lise meitner?
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She was an Austrian-Swedish physicist.
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Though Jewish, her father was a confirmed freethinker, and she was brought up as such. As an adult, she converted to Christianity, following Lutheranism, and was baptised in 1908. Her sisters Gisela and Lola converted to Catholicism that same year.
Lise Meitner | Early years
"I am of Jewish descent", she told Frida, "I am not Jewish by belief, know nothing of the history of Judaism, and do not feel closer to Jews than to other people." On 25 January 1946, Meitner arrived in New York, where she was greeted by her sisters Lola and Frida, and by Frisch, who had made the two-day train trip from Los Alamos. Lola's husband Rudolf Allers arranged a visiting professorship for Meitner at the Catholic University of America. Meitner lectured at Princeton University, Harvard University and Columbia University, and discussed physics with Albert Einstein, Hermann Weyl, Tsung-Dao Lee, Yang Chen-Ning and Isidor Isaac Rabi.
Lise Meitner | Later life
Meitner's earliest research began at age eight, when she kept a notebook of her records underneath her pillow. She was particularly drawn to mathematics and science, and first studied colours of an oil slick, thin films, and reflected light. Women were not allowed to attend public institutions of higher education in Vienna until 1897, and she completed her final year of school in 1892. Her education included bookkeeping, arithmetic, history, geography, science, French and gymnastics. The only career available to women was teaching, so she trained as a French teacher. Her sister Gisela passed the "Matura", and entered medical school in 1900.
Lise Meitner | Education
Meitner found that Siegbahn did not want her. At the time the offer to come to Sweden had been extended, he had said that he had no money, and could only offer Meitner a place to work. Eva von Bahr had then written to Carl Wilhelm Oseen, who had provided money from the Nobel Foundation. This left her with laboratory space, but now she had to perform herself work that for the previous twenty years she had been able to delegate to her laboratory technicians. Ruth Lewin Sime wrote that: On 14 January 1939, Meitner learned that her brother-in-law Jutz had been released from Dachau and he and her sister Gusti were permitted to emigrate to Sweden.
Lise Meitner | Later life
In Sweden, Meitner continued her research as best she could. She measured the neutron cross sections of thorium, lead and uranium using dysprosium as a neutron detector, an assay technique pioneered by George de Hevesy and Hilde Levi. She was able to arrange for Hedwig Kohn, who faced deportation Poland, to come Sweden, and eventually to emigrate to the United States, travelling via the Soviet Union. She was unsuccessful in bringing Stefen Meyer out, but he managed to survive the war. She declined an offer to join Frisch on the British mission to the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory, declaring "I will have nothing to do with a bomb!" She later said that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had come as a surprise to her, and that she was "sorry that the bomb had to be invented".
Lise Meitner | Later life
She was born Elise Meitner on 7 November 1878 into a Jewish upper-middle-class family at the family home in 27 Kaiser Josefstrasse in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna, the third of eight children of Hedwig and Philipp Meitner. The birth register of Vienna's Jewish community lists her as being born on 17 November 1878, but all other documents list her date of birth as 7 November, which is what she used. She shortened her name from Elise to Lise. Her father was one of the first Jewish lawyers admitted to practice in Austria. She had two older siblings, Gisela and Auguste (Gusti), and five younger: Moriz (Fritz), Carola (Lola), Frida and Walter; all eight, including the five girls, ultimately pursued an advanced education.
Lise Meitner | Early years
After the war Meitner acknowledged her own moral failing in staying in Germany from 1933 to 1938. She wrote: "It was not only stupid but very wrong that I did not leave at once." She not only regretted her inaction during this period, she was also bitterly critical of Hahn, Max von Laue, Werner Heisenberg, and other German scientists. In a June 1945 letter addressed to Hahn, but that he never received, she wrote: In the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, Meitner found that she had become a celebrity. She had a radio interview with Eleanor Roosevelt, and a few days later another one with a radio station in New York, during which heard her sister Frida's voice for the first time in years.
Lise Meitner | Later life
Born in Detroit, Meiser studied at the Liggett School, Kox Schule in Dresden, Germany, and the Ecole de la Cour de St. Pierre in Geneva, Switzerland before eventually attending Vassar College.
Edith Meiser | Early life
Lise Meitner (; ; 7 November 1878 – 27 October 1968) was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who contributed to the discoveries of the element protactinium and nuclear fission. While working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on radioactivity, she discovered the radioactive isotope protactinium-231 in 1917. In 1938, Meitner and nephew-physicist Otto Robert Frisch discovered nuclear fission. She was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie". Completing her doctoral research in 1905, Meitner became the first woman from the University of Vienna and second in the world to earn a doctorate in physics. She spent most of her scientific career in Berlin, Germany, where she was a physics professor and a department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute; she was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany.
Lise Meitner | Introduction
With Giesel's help, she was able to produce a pure product that was strongly radioactive. By December 1917 she was able to isolate both the mother isotope and its actinium daughter product. She submitted their findings for publication in March 1918.
Lise Meitner | World War I and the discovery of protactinium
She lost these positions in the 1930s because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany, and in 1938 she fled to Sweden, where she lived for many years, ultimately becoming a Swedish citizen. In mid-1938, Meitner with chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute found that bombarding thorium with neutrons produced different isotopes. Hahn and Strassmann later in the year showed that isotopes of barium could be formed by bombardment of uranium. In late December, Meitner and Frisch worked out the phenomenon of such splitting process. In their report in February issue of "Nature" in 1939, they gave the name "fission".
Lise Meitner | Introduction
She went down to Durham, North Carolina and saw Hertha Spooner and Hedwing Kohn, and spent an evening in Washington, DC, with James Chadwick, who was now the head of the British Mission to the Manhattan Project. She also met the project's director, Major General Leslie Groves. She spoke at Smith College, and went to Chicago, where she met Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf and Leo Szilard. On 8 July, Meitner boarded the for England, where she met with Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli and Max Born. There were belated celebrations for the 300th birthday of Isaac Newton, but the only German invited to attend was Max Planck.
Lise Meitner | Later life
Meier was born in 1926 in Dagmersellen in the Canton of Lucerne. Her parents were Nicholas Meier, a hotel porter, and Josi Kumschick, a waitress and housewife. During her childhood, the family moved to the city of Lucerne. She attended the University of Geneva to study law and became a registered lawyer in 1952.
Josi Meier | Early life
Jutz's boss, Gottfried Bermann had escaped to Sweden, and offered Jutz his old job back at the publishing firm if he was able to come. Niels Bohr interceded with a Swedish official, Justitieråd Alexandersson, who said that Jutz would receive a labour permit on arrival in Sweden. He worked there until he was pensioned off in 1948, and then moved to Cambridge to join Otto Robert Frisch. Her sister Gisela and brother-in-law Karl Lion moved to England, Meitner also considered moving to Britain. She visited Cambridge in July 1939, and accepted an offer from William Lawrence Bragg and John Cockcroft of a position at the Cavendish Laboratory on a three-year contract with Girton College, Cambridge, but the Second World War broke out in September 1939 before she could make the move.
Lise Meitner | Later life
In 1963, she moved to the United States, initially living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, then in Wellfleet, where she lived with Barbara Deming and her partner, American artist Mary Meigs. In 1975, after two years of living in Brittany, she moved back to Quebec. For about twenty years she divided her time between Montreal, the Eastern Townships of Quebec and Key West, Florida, where she maintains her permanent home. She has also obtained American citizenship.
Marie-Claire Blais | Early life and education
Meitner was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie". On her visit to the US in 1946, she received the honour "Woman of the Year" from the National Press Club and had dinner with the President of the United States, Harry S. Truman, at the Women's National Press Club. She received the Leibniz Medal from the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1924, the Lieben Prize from the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1925, the Ellen Richards Prize in 1928, the City of Vienna Prize for science in 1947, Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society jointly with Hahn in 1949, the inaugural Otto Hahn Prize of the German Chemical Society in 1954, the Wilhelm Exner Medal in 1960, and in 1967, the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art.
Lise Meitner | Awards and honours
Maria Leitner came from a bilingual Jewish family. She was born, the eldest of her parents' three recorded children, on 19 January 1892 in Varaždin, Austria-Hungary, today in Croatia. Her father, Leopold Leitner, ran a small building business. In 1896 the family relocated to Budapest where she grew up and attended "The Royal Senior Girls' School" between 1902 and 1910. It was probably here that she learned both her English and her French. She then studied art history in Vienna and Berlin, completing an internship in Paul Cassirer's Berlin gallery which resulted in a translation into German of William Hogarth's "Aufzeichnungen" (loosely: ""notes"")
Maria Leitner | Early years
For her friends in Sweden, Siegbahn's obstruction of Meitner's Nobel Prize was the final straw, and they resolved to get her a better position. In 1947, Meitner moved to the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, where established a new facility for atomic research. There had been scant nuclear physics research in Sweden, which was blamed on Siegbahn's lack of support for Meitner's work, and now such knowledge seemed vital for Sweden's future. At the KTH, Meitner had three rooms, two assistants, and access to technicians, with the amiable Sigvard Eklund occupying the room next door. The intention was that Meitner would have the salary and title of a "research professor"—one without teaching duties.
Lise Meitner | Later life
She could not leave for Denmark, Switzerland or any other country. Bohr came to Berlin in June, and was gravely concerned. When he returned to Copenhagen, he began looking for a position for Meitner in Scandinavia. He also asked Hans Kramers to see if anything was available in the Netherlands. Kramers contacted Costner, who in turn notified Adriaan Fokker. Coster and Fokker attempted to secure a position for Meitner at the University of Groningen. They found that the Rockefeller Foundation would not support refugee scientists, and that the International Federation of University Women had been flooded with applications for support from Austria.
Lise Meitner | Escape from Germany
Furstenberg was born in Israel, to Jewish parents. She moved to New York City when she was six weeks old and lived there until her family returned to Israel when she was 16.
Hani Furstenberg | Early life
Born in the small Bavarian town of Amberg, Meier didn't originally aspire a career in modelling. Instead, after graduating from school, she enrolled at the Fachhochschule Regensburg in order to study mathematics.
Barbara Meier | Early life
On 16 February 1998, her sixteenth birthday, she became an Austrian citizen and a member of the Austrian table tennis squad. Husband David Arvidsson is an international Danish table tennis player.
Liu Jia | Early life
Fackenheim's affirmation of his Jewish heritage, although embraced by many other Holocaust survivors, was by no means universal. Physicist Lise Meitner had been born and brought up Jewish. She rejected newspaper attempts to characterize her as a Jew following the bombing of Hiroshima when the press learned that she had been the first scientist to recognize nuclear fission. Decades before Hitler rose to power she had become a Lutheran. Although the Nazis stole her savings and ruined her career she refused to work on the bomb or let Hitler define her identity.
Emil Fackenheim | Conversion to other religions
Anxious to finish up before the Christmas break, Hahn and Strassmann submitted their findings to "Naturwissenschaften" on 22 December without waiting for Meitner to reply. Hahn concluded the paper with: "As chemists... we should substitute the symbols Ba, La, Ce for Ra, Ac, Th. As 'nuclear chemists' fairly close to physics we cannot yet bring ourselves to take this step which contradicts all previous experience in physics." Frisch normally celebrated Christmas with Meitner in Berlin, but in 1938 she accepted an invitation from Eva von Bahr to spend it with her family at Kungälv, and Meitner asked Frisch to join her there.
Lise Meitner | Nuclear fission
She became the second woman to earn a doctoral degree in physics, after Elsa Neumann who received the degree from the University of Berlin in 1899. Her thesis was published as "Wärmeleitung in inhomogenen Körpern" (""Thermal Conduction in Inhomogeneous Bodies"") on 22 February 1906.
Lise Meitner | Education
The President of Germany, Theodor Heuss, awarded her the highest German order for scientists, the peace class of the Pour le Mérite in 1957, the same year as Hahn. Meitner became a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1945, and a full member in 1951, permitting her to participate in the Nobel Prize process. Four years later she was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. She was also elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960. She received honorary doctorates from Adelphi College, the University of Rochester, Rutgers University and Smith College in the United States, and from the University of Stockholm in Sweden.
Lise Meitner | Awards and honours
The third of three children, Lise was born to a French family in Mauritius, but was a British subject as all Mauritians then were. Her parents taught her and her siblings French from an early age and they moved to Paris in 1919.
Lise de Baissac | Early life
Later that year she married and became pregnant. Her husband's work then took the family to Switzerland where a second child was born in 1955. Warburg devoted the following years to her family.
Lise Warburg | Early life
These included Arnold Flammersfeld, Kan-Chang Wang and Nikolaus Riehl. In 1926, she became an "außerordentlicher Professor" (extraordinary professor), the first woman university physics professor in Germany. Her physics section became larger, and she acquired a permanent assistant. Scientists from Germany and around the world came to the KWI for Chemistry to conduct research under her supervision. In 1930, Meitner taught a seminar on "Questions of Atomic Physics and Atomic Chemistry" with Leó Szilárd. Meitner had a Wilson cloud chamber constructed at the KWI for Chemistry, the first one in Berlin, and with her student Kurt Freitag studied the tracks of alpha particles that did not collide with a nucleus.
Lise Meitner | Beta radiation
With the "Anschluss", Germany's unification with Austria on 12 March 1938, Meitner lost her Austrian citizenship. Niels Bohr extended an offer to lecture in Copenhagen, and Paul Scherrer invited her to attend a congress in Switzerland, with all expenses paid. Carl Bosch still said that she could remain at the KWI for Chemistry, but by May she was aware that the Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture was looking into her case. On 9 May she decided to accept Bohr's invitation to go to Copenhagen, where Frisch worked, but when she went to the Danish consulate to get a travel visa, she was told that Denmark no longer recognised her Austrian passport as valid.
Lise Meitner | Escape from Germany
Mei Lanfang was born in Beijing in 1894 into a family of Peking opera and Kunqu performers (performers of a traditional Chinese theatre composed of drama, ballet, opera, poetry, and music) of Taizhou, Jiangsu ancestry.
Mei Lanfang | Early life
Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing to Chinese and Dutch-American parents, and grew up near Boston, Massachusetts. She was educated at Barnard, Reed, and Columbia University. After receiving her M.F.A. from Columbia in 1974, she settled in rural northern New Mexico, which has remained her primary residence ever since.
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge | Personal life
After liberation, Meijer grew up in a Jewish orphanage since her parents had died at Bergen Belsen in January 1945.
Berthe Meijer | Early life
Steiner was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1927. Shortly after Adolf Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, she and her family emigrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina. She studied art at the University of Buenos Aires and the Fernando Fader School of Decorative Arts.
Lisl Steiner | Early life and education
She returned to Germany in 1934 to study print screening.
Marie Gudme Leth | Early life
Eisler was born in Vienna, fled from the Nazis with her parents to Cuba as a small child, and later emigrated to the United States. She obtained degrees in sociology and law from UCLA.
Riane Eisler | Early life
Born in Vienna, with Styrian ancestry, Leitner studied at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna with Wolfgang Schulz and at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg with Robert Aitken.
Karin Leitner | Early life and education
Littner was born in New York City to an American mother and an Austrian-Jewish father, who had fled the Nazis in the 1930s. His father worked as a chemical engineer. The family emigrated to the United Kingdom soon after Littner's birth. Littner holds British citizenship, and is fluent in French and Spanish. He is a practising Jew.
Claude Littner | Early life
Encouraged and backed by her father's financial support, Meitner went to the Friedrich Wilhelm University in the Dahlem district of Berlin, where the renowned physicist Max Planck taught. Planck invited her to his home, and allowed her to attend his lectures, which was an unusual gesture by Planck, who was on the record as being opposing women being admitted to universities in general, but was willing to admit that there was the occasional exception; apparently he recognised Meitner as one of the exceptions. She became friends with Planck's twin daughters Emma and Grete, who shared her love of music. Attending Planck's lectures did not take up all her time, and Meitner approached Heinrich Rubens, the head of the experimental physics institute, about doing some research.
Lise Meitner | Friedrich Wilhelm University
At the age of 4, Bronner’s family escaped from Hungary to seek a better life in a different country. They left the country and managed to stay in Austria for 6 months before moving to the United States. Both of her parents were holocaust survivors and have had a strong influence on Bronner’s personality.
Marianne Bronner | Early years
Friedmann was born in Vienna to Israel and Gisella Kohlman in 1910. In 1931 Kohlmann married Karl Friedmann. They divorced one year later.
Litzi Friedmann | Early life
Aubert was born in what is now Celje, Slovenia, but at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She grew up in Vienna.
Lenore Aubert | Early years
Lichtenstein was born in Budapest in 1863. Her maternal grandfather was German singer , and her uncle was artist . She studied at the Charlotte Square Institution in Edinburgh, where her uncle George Lichtenstein was a director. In 1880, she performed piano duets with Sir Charles Hallé. She continued her studies at the Royal Academy of Music in Vienna; she is said to have also studied with Liszt around this time.
Clara Lichtenstein | Early life
Beginning in 1952, she regularly spent summers in Germany. She continued to reside in Beverly Hills until her death in Los Angeles on 30 January 1969.
Fritzi Massary | Later life
Becker-Ho was born in Shanghai, her mother Chinese, her father, originally from Alsace-Lorraine, a territory under dispute between France and Germany until the end of the First World War, claimed French citizenship. In 1947 her father moved the family to France.
Alice Becker-Ho | Early life
In July 1914—shortly before the outbreak of World War I in August—Hahn was called to active duty with the army in a "Landwehr" regiment. Meitner undertook X-ray technician training, and a course on anatomy at the city hospital in Lichterfelde. Meanwhile, she completed both the work on the beta ray spectrum that she had begun before the war with Hahn and Baeyer, and her own study of the uranium decay chain. In July 1915, she returned to Vienna, where she joined the Austrian Army as an X-ray nurse-technician. Her unit was soon deployed to the Eastern front in Poland, and she also served on the Italian front for a while before being discharged in September 1916.
Lise Meitner | World War I and the discovery of protactinium
Seitelman was born in Würzburg, Germany to a Jewish family and immigrated to America, where she settled in Brooklyn, New York.
Margot Seitelman | Early life
Zetterling was born in Västerås, Sweden, to a working class family. She started her career as an actress at the age of 17 at Dramaten, the Swedish national theatre, appearing in war-era films.
Mai Zetterling | Early life
Germaine Alice Schnitzer was born in Paris and studied music at the Conservatoire de Paris, with further training under Raoul Pugno and with Emil von Sauer at the Vienna Conservatory. She was sometimes referred to as "Viennese", and while in Vienna won a prize for music from the Austrian government.
Germaine Schnitzer | Early life
According to interview testimony from her older brother, she was sexually molested by her father, though the full extent of his abuse remains unclear. She had a bourgeois upbringing, was primarily educated by a series of private tutors, achieving fluency in Italian, German, and French. Her private education even when the family suffered financial strain after WWI. Despite her privileged upbringing, she frequently recalled her childhood as difficult. At age 19, she began studying music with composer (and father of her childhood friend Gertrude) Arnold Schönberg, and was familiar to members of his circle. "If ever in my life I had one teacher and one great influence, it was Schönberg," she said.
Lisette Model | Early life and education
Johanna Mikl-Leitner was born in Hollabrunn, Lower Austria. She grew up in Großharras, where she attended primary school from 1970 till 1974. She went to a grammar school which specializes in natural sciences (Realgymnasium) in Laa an der Thaya. In 1978, she switched to business school (Handelsakademie) in Laa, where she took her A-levels (Matura) in 1983. Mikl-Leitner studied Business Education at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and graduated with a Master of Social and Economic Sciences degree.
Johanna Mikl-Leitner | Early life and education
Liskov was born November 7, 1939 in Los Angeles, California, to a Jewish family, the eldest of Jane (née Dickhoff) and Moses Huberman's four children. She earned her BA in mathematics with a minor in physics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. In her classes she had one other female classmate, the rest were male. After she graduated she applied to graduate mathematics programs at Berkeley and Princeton. At the time Princeton was not accepting female students in mathematics. She was accepted at Berkeley but instead of studying she moved to Boston and began working at Mitre Corporation.
Barbara Liskov | Early life and education
Rubens said that he would be happy for her to work in his laboratory. He also added that Otto Hahn at the chemistry institute was looking for a physicist to collaborate with. A few minutes later she was introduced to Hahn. He had studied radioactive substances under Sir William Ramsay, and in Montreal under Rutherford, and was already credited with the discovery of what were then thought to be several new radioactive elements. (In fact, they were isotopes of known elements, but the concept of an isotope, along with the term, was only propounded by Frederick Soddy in 1913.) Hahn was the same age as herself, and she noted his informal and approachable manner.
Lise Meitner | Friedrich Wilhelm University
Freda Meissner was born in Dresden in 1927, the youngest of four children. Her mother was from a wealthy family of industrialists. Her father, Dr. Ferdinand Meissner Hohenmeiss, was an economist and journalist. Freda spent her first three years growing up in Reichenberg (now Liberec) before the family moved to Linz where Freda went to school. She grew up in a liberal, educated household and enjoyed nature, culture, and art. The Meissners moved to Vienna in 1938, where Ferdinand became editor of a newspaper that was critical of the Nazi movement. He was deemed an enemy of the state for his outspoken opposition and he was fled to the United Kingdom in 1939.
Freda Meissner-Blau | Early life
Lise Lindbæk was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, as the daughter of priest and journalist Johannes Peder Lindbæk and teacher and writer Sofie Aubert. She grew up in Copenhagen and later in Roskilde. After the death of her father, she moved with her mother to Kristiania, Norway in 1920. She married newspaper editor Sanfrid Neander-Nilsson in 1927, and their daughter Janka was born in 1929. Due to political disagreements (her husband sympathized with the Nazis), the marriage was dissolved in 1933, and Lise settled in Genoa as a single mother. From 1934 to 1939 she lived with physician Max Julius Carl Alexander Hodann, a former city physician () in Berlin-Reinickendorf who had emigrated due to harassment from the Nazi regime.
Lise Lindbæk | Personal life
In 1899, Meitner began taking private lessons with two other young women, cramming the missing eight years of secondary education into just two. Physics was taught by Arthur Szarvasy. In July 1901 the girls sat an external examination at the Akademisches Gymnasium. Only four out of fourteen girls passed, including Meitner and Henriette Boltzmann, the daughter of physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. Meitner entered the University of Vienna in October 1901. She was particularly inspired by Boltzmann, and was said to often speak with contagious enthusiasm of his lectures. Her dissertation was supervised by Franz Exner and Hans Benndorf. Her thesis titled "Prüfung einer Formel Maxwells" (""Examination of Maxwell's Formula"") was submitted on 28 November 1905, evaluated by Exner and Boltzmann, and approved on 28 November 1905.
Lise Meitner | Education
This marriage ended in a divorce, however, and, after moving around for a few years, she immigrated to New York City in 1933.
Sarah Reisen | Early life
Born and educated in Vienna, Austria, she studied descriptive and projective geometry at the Technical University of Vienna and mathematics at the University of Vienna. Her teachers Moritz Schlick and Hans Hahn were among the luminaries of the Vienna Circle; and her fellow students included physicist Victor Weisskopf, sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, and social psychologist Marie Jahoda. Her father, Rabbi , was head of the Maimonides Institute, and regularly led high holiday services at the famed Vienna Musikverein. He worked for the Alliance Israélite Universelle investigating pogroms in Eastern Europe and raised money in the U.S. and Western Europe to help victims.
Irene Fischer | Early life and education
Julia I. Felsenthal was born in Chicago, the daughter of rabbi Bernhard Felsenthal and Henrietta Blumenfeld Felsenthal. Both of her parents were born in Germany.
Julia I. Felsenthal | Early life
Yes! I have to!" On July 12, 1953, she left the residential school Goldenstein with the degree of "Mittlere Reife".
Romy Schneider | Early life
Russell was born as Liane Brauch in 1923 in Vienna, Austria, to a Jewish household, the oldest of three children to Clara (Starer) and Arthur Brauch. Her father was a chemist and her mother was a singing teacher. From the age of 3 to 15, the family lived on the Wiedner Hauptstrasse, not far from the Vienna Opera. There were frequent musical gatherings in the apartment, and the family enjoyed skiing and other outings in the Alps. One of her childhood playmates was first cousin, Robert Starer, Austrian-born American composer and pianist. Her somewhat idyllic childhood abruptly came to an end on the evening of March 12, 1938, but her family stayed in Vienna even after the Anschluss.
Liane Russell | Early life
However, her permanent residence remained in Neu-Ulm, Bavaria, Germany.
Meşale Tolu | Early life
Leichter was born Marianne Katharina Pick in 1895 in Vienna, the second daughter of a Jewish couple, lawyer Josef Pick (1849, Náchod1926) and his wife Charlotte "Lotte" Rubinstein (1871, Galați1939). Her older sister was the Austrian-American composer and music therapist Vally Weigl. Käthe graduated from the Beamten-Töchter-Lyceum in 1914 and subsequently began studying political science at the University of Vienna. Since, at the time, Austrian women were not allowed to graduate, she transferred to the German Heidelberg University in 1917; she graduated in July 1918 before returning to Vienna to complete two further semesters at the university.
Käthe Leichter | Early life
Fritz was born to American Presbyterian missionaries Arthur Minton Guttery and the former Myrtle Chaney in Hankow, China, where she lived until she was twelve. Growing up, she attended a British school and kept a journal about her days in China with Lin Nai-Nai, her amah. The family emigrated to the United States when she was in the eighth grade. She graduated from Wheaton College in Massachusetts in 1937 and married Michael Fritz in 1941. They had two children, David and Andrea.
Jean Fritz | Early life
She was born Amélie Munk on 31 May 1928 in Ansbach, Bavaria, Germany, the daughter of Elie Munk (1900–1981), a rabbi and rabbinic scholar, and his wife, Fanny Frumet Munk, née Goldberger (1906–1979). In 1936, they moved to Paris, and after the Nazi invasion, moved to Switzerland in 1940, and remained there until Paris was liberated.
Amélie Jakobovits | Early life
In 1921, Meitner accepted an invitation from Manne Siegbahn to come to Sweden and give a series of lectures on radioactivity as a visiting professor at Lund University. She found that very little research had been done on radioactivity in Sweden, but she was eager to learn about X-ray spectroscopy, which was Siegbahn's specialty. At his laboratory, she met a Dutch doctoral candidate, Dirk Coster, who was studying X-ray spectroscopy, and his wife Miep, who was working on her doctorate in Indonesian language and culture. Armed with this knowledge, Meitner took a fresh look at the beta-ray spectra when she returned to Berlin.
Lise Meitner | Beta radiation
Born in Vienna in 1914, she came to America in 1940. She is the daughter of Egon Bergson and Therese Bergson. She was an actress prior to moving to America.
Maria Bergson | Early life and education
Lise Haavik was born in Narvik, Norway on 23 February 1962. She moved to Denmark in 1982 to study economics at the University of Odense and the Copenhagen Business School. Haavik partnered with John Hatting in late 1983 and they soon married. At that point, she pursued music full-time and stopped her economics studies.
Lise Haavik | Early life
Lien then traveled between The Hague, Vienna (where the family mostly lived) and Lausanne, where she went to a private school and became fluent in French.
Lien Deyers | Early Life
Lisette Model was born Elise Amelie Felicie Stern in the family home in the 8th district of Vienna, Austria-Hungary. Her father, Victor, was an Italian/Austrian doctor of Jewish descent attached to the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Army and, later, to the International Red Cross; her mother Felicie was French and Roman Catholic, and Model was baptised into her mother's faith. She had a brother, Salvatór, who was older by one year. Due to growing anti-Semitism in Austria and her father's struggle with his Jewish-Austrian identity, he had their last name changed to "Seybert" in February 1903"," and six years later, her younger sister Olga was born.
Lisette Model | Early life and education
She was born Louise Ruth Wolpert in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad), and brought up in Berlin. Her father was a Russian-speaking Latvian Jew and a wealthy textile merchant; her mother, also Jewish, a German-speaking Lithuanian from a family of rich corn merchants. She was nicknamed "Lisl" by an aunt, from which she derived Elisabeth, the name she later adopted for herself.
Elisabeth Furse | Early life
The Meitner family, ancestors of Austrian nuclear physicist Lise Meitner (1878–1968), settled in Majetín. Under the rule of Emperor Joseph II in the late 18th century, they adopted the surname "Meietheiner", derived from their place of origin.
Majetín | Notable people
Tumler was born in Innsbruck and is the daughter of an Austrian father with Slovenian-Italian descent and a French mother from the island of Martinique. At the age of 19, she moved to London, where she studied journalism, media and sociology, and later moved to Paris where she participated in theater courses at the Cours Florent.
Alice Tumler | Early life and education
If she wanted to go to the toilet, she had to use one at the restaurant down the street. The following year, women were admitted to Prussian universities, and Fischer lifted the restrictions, and had women's toilets installed in the building. Not all the chemists were happy about this. The Institute of Physics was more accepting, and she became friends with the physicists there, including , James Franck, Gustav Hertz, Robert Pohl, Max Planck, and Wilhelm Westphal.
Lise Meitner | Friedrich Wilhelm University
Her nominators included Arthur Compton, Dirk Coster, Kasimir Fajans, James Franck, Otto Hahn, Oscar Klein, Niels Bohr, Max Planck and Max Born. Despite not having been awarded the Nobel Prize, Meitner was invited to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1962. Max Perutz, the 1962 Nobel prizewinner in chemistry, reached a similar conclusion: "Having been locked up in the Nobel Committee's files these fifty years, the documents leading to this unjust award now reveal that the protracted deliberations by the Nobel jury were hampered by lack of appreciation both of the joint work that had preceded the discovery and of Meitner's written and verbal contributions after her flight from Berlin."
Lise Meitner | Nobel Prize for nuclear fission
Eveline Iris Zoller was born on April 13, 1936, in Dardagny, Switzerland, the daughter of Johann Zoller and Pauline Feller Zoller. Her father was a blacksmith, and her parents ran a gas station and shop. Evelyne Zoller moved to the United States to work as an "au pair". She became an American citizen in 1965, and began using the spelling "Evelyne" for her first name at that time.
Evelyne Daitz | Early life
Meitner returned to the KWI for Chemistry and her research in October. In January 1917, she was appointed the head of her own physics section. The Hahn-Meitner Laboratory was divided into separate Hahn and Meitner Laboratories, and her pay was increased to 4,000 marks. Hahn returned to Berlin on leave, and they discussed another loose end from their pre-war work: the search for the mother isotope of actinium. According to the radioactive displacement law of Fajans and Soddy, this had to be an isotope of the undiscovered element 91 on the periodic table that lay between thorium and uranium. Kasimir Fajans and Oswald Helmuth Göhring discovered this element in 1913, and named it "brevium" after its short half life.
Lise Meitner | World War I and the discovery of protactinium
She was born on 23 February 1932 in Kärnten, Austria. When she was six years old, the Nazis invaded her home in Kärnten, and even arrested her mother three times. After World War II, life was hard in Austria, and she decided to study in the United States. In 1951 she won one of the first Austrian Fulbright Scholarships and enrolled at a Colorado Women's College.
Inge Sargent | Early life
Maria-Elisabeth Schaeffler was born in Prague in 1941, then in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and grew up in Vienna, Austria.
Maria-Elisabeth Schaeffler | Early life
By the late 1980s, these factors had eroded the qualities that had earned her initial stardom, and she was forced to spend the remainder of her life in Austria, where she subsisted in straitened circumstances.
Marisa Mell | Introduction
Lise Thiry was born in 1921 on 5 February in Liege. Her father was Marcel Thiry who was a leading French poet. She was one of three female students, in 1940, who studied medicine at the University of Liege. She graduated in 1946.
Lise Thiry | Early life and education
Since 2008 the Austrian Physical Society together with the German Physical Society organize the Lise-Meitner-Lectures, a series of annual public talks given by distinguished female physicists, and since 2015 the AlbaNova University Centre in Stockholm has an annual Lise Meitner Distinguished Lecture. In 2016, the Institute of Physics in the UK established the Meitner Medal for public engagement within physics. In 2017, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy in the United States named a major nuclear energy research program after her.
Lise Meitner | Awards and honours
Mary Kaestner was American, from Wisconsin or California, though she was sometimes described as Viennese or German.
Mary Kaestner | Early life
In 1938, she returned to the United States and appeared in concert with the Kansas City Philharmonic. She continued her education at the Juilliard School, graduating in May 1945. In the same year, she received the Leventritt Award. Meiszner performed with most of major orchestras in the United States and Europe, including the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra.
Louise Meiszner | Introduction
Grunberg-Manago was born into a family of artists who adhered to the teachings of the Swiss educational reformer Johann Pestalozzi. When she was 9 months old, Grunberg-Manago's parents emigrated from the Soviet Union to France.
Marianne Grunberg-Manago | Early life
Libermann was one of three sisters born to a family of Russian-Ukrainian Jewish immigrants to Paris. She began her studies in 1938 at the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles, a college in Sèvres for training women to become teachers, but was prevented from taking the agrégation and becoming a teacher because of anti-Jewish laws instituted by the German occupation. Instead, she began doing research under the supervision of Élie Cartan. In 1942, she and her family escaped Paris for Lyon, where they hid from the Nazis for two years. After the liberation of Paris in 1944, she returned to Sèvres and completed her studies.
Paulette Libermann | Early life and education
Le Beau was born in Teschen, Austria-Hungary, now in modern-day Poland. Le Beau studied at the University of Vienna for her undergraduate degree, and earned her Ph.D. in chemistry with minors in physics and mathematics from the University of Graz in 1931. In 1955, she married Henry W. Meyer.
Désirée Le Beau | Early life and education
Due to Swiss neutrality, Lesh grew up unscathed by the effects of World War II, and the havoc wreaked on her mother's native Austria after its annexation by the Third Reich. After the War, however, Lesch's life changed radically with the breakdown of her parents marriage. Her mother took Lesch from her father and her native Switzerland, when she was only twelve years old, to live first in West Germany in 1947, and then, because of her mother's political convictions, to the newly formed (1949) communist East Germany in 1951, when Lesch was just sixteen.
Karin Lesch | Early life
Women were granted the right of habilitation in Prussia in 1920, and in 1922 Meitner was granted her habilitation and became a "Privatdozentin". She was the first woman to receive her habilitation in physics in Prussia, and only the second in Germany after Hedwig Kohn. Since Meitner had already published over 40 papers, she was not required to submit a thesis, but Max von Laue recommended that the requirement for an inaugural lecture not be waived, since he was interested in what she had to say. She therefore gave an inaugural lecture on "Problems of Cosmic Physics". From 1923 to 1933, she taught a colloquium or tutorial at Friedrich Wilhelm University each semester, and supervised doctoral students at the KWI for Chemistry.
Lise Meitner | Beta radiation
Fajgeles was born in Sartrouville, Yvelines. Her grandparents were Polish Jews.
Élise Fajgeles | Early life
Kerschbaumer was born in Garches near Paris where her Cuban father and Austrian mother were living to escape the Spanish Civil War. After spending her childhood years mainly in Costa Rica and the Austrian Tyrol, she worked in England for a year when she was 17 and then went on to Italy. In 1957, she returned to Austria to further her education. From 1963, she studied Romance languages at Vienna University and spent two years in Romania before earning a doctorate in Romanian linguistics in 1973. In 1971, she married the painter Helmut Kurz-Goldenstein.
Marie-Thérèse Kerschbaumer | Early life and education
There is little known about her art education, but her connection with Schönberg exposed her to the contemporary art scene and leading Avante-garde artists such as Gustav Klimt. Early exposure to Expressionism was what perhaps influenced her interest in observing people, and subsequently, photography. Model left Vienna with Olga and Felicie for Paris after her father died of cancer in 1924 to study voice with Polish soprano Marya Freund in 1926. Felicie and Olga moved on to Nice, but Lisette stayed in Paris, the new cultural hub after WWI, to continue studying music. It was during this period that she met her future husband, the Jewish, Russian-born painter Evsa Model (1901–1976), whom she went on to marry in September 1937.
Lisette Model | Early life and education
She was born in Darmstadt, Germany on 2 May 1911 to Margarete Neumann (1885–1954) and Julius Joel Goldstein (1873–1929), a philosopher. As a young woman, she moved to Paris, where she found work as secretary to a banker. In 1931, Elsbeth married her childhood love, Hans Peter Juda (1904–1975), and they went to live in Berlin where he was a financial editor at the "Berliner Tageblatt". In 1933, they fled Nazi Germany for London with nothing but two suitcases and a violin.
Elsbeth Juda | Early life
This principle led to the development of the first atomic bomb during World War II, and the subsequently other nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors.
Lise Meitner | Introduction
Born in Belgium as Henriette Goldfarb, she escaped the country with her family before the Nazi occupation. She wanted to become an actress; her mother opposed the idea, but relented when Fargé was accepted at the Conservatoire National.
Annie Fargé | Early life
On 17 May 1932, von Weizsacker was born as Marianne Viktoria Armgard Helene Doria von Kretschmann in Essen, Germany. Her mother, Asta, was the adopted daughter of prominent banker and industrialist .
Marianne von Weizsäcker | Early life
In the early 1990s, Li Binzhu, who had never remarried and lived alone, visited her children in Vienna, the hometown of Richard Frey. In 1994, she suffered a severe stroke there, which resulted in paralysis. She spent her remaining life in the "hospital Hietzing" and in the "Kaiser-Franz-Josef-Spital". During her treatment and stay in the hospital she always received the attention and help of the government of both countries. For her birthday, the mayor of Vienna wrote her a letter of sympathy. In 2005, on the occasion of the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the victory in the War of Resistance, the Chinese ambassador of Austria visited her in the hospital.
Li Binzhu | Later years
She lived in Paris before returning to New York to continue her theatre studies at Stella Adler Studio of Acting in NYC, then MIT and Harvard University.
Meissa Hampton | Early life
Hergesheimer was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania on January 7, 1873. Her parents were Charles P. Hergesheimer and Ellamanda Ritter Hergesheimer. She was encouraged to create art in her childhood. Hergesheimer was the great-great granddaughter of Philadelphia artist Charles Willson Peale, who named one of his daughters Sophonisba after the Italian artist, Sofonisba Anguissola. Hergesheimer chose to use Sophonisba as her first name.
Ella Sophonisba Hergesheimer | Early life
To avoid the Nazi reprisal of Sippenhaft (kin liability), Freda's parents divorced and the family moved back to Liberec. Freda continued her education there, and then in Vienna and Dresden. During this time many of Freda's relatives and friends perished during the war, and Freda's own experiences witnessing the bombing of Dresden galvanized her ambition to pursue progressive and activist causes. Freda returned to Vienna in 1947 and obtained a leaving certificate before going on to communication studies and journalism, working during her studies for the American occupation in Vienna. She travelled to England that same year to visit her father, before completing nursing school and then finally moving to Frankfurt, Germany to study medicine at the Goethe University Frankfurt.
Freda Meissner-Blau | Early life