Lise Meitner

By Tamara Wilson

Lise Meitner was born in Vienna, Austria on November 7, 1878. She was born into a liberal Viennese family. She was the daughter of Philipp Meitner and his wife Hedwig (geb Skowran) Meitner. Meitner was the third of eight children of a Jewish family. Both her parents originate from Jewish families, but they let their children be baptized Protestant.

She was a shy and reserved child, a personality trait that would be remarkable later in her life. Her parents hired a private tutor for Meitner to study to go to University. She discovered that her talent and interest was in mathematics and physics. She greatly admired Marie Curie and Florence Nightingale. She played the piano; it continued to be passionate about music for the rest of her life.

Mathematics and physics were the main two subjects she focused on. She was accomplished and passed the entrance exams with a very high acceptance mark and was accepted to Vienna university, a prestigious institution attended by such luminaries as Freud. She entered the university in October of 1901. She loved studying her two passions mathematics and physics, until a difficult calculus problem and an unsympathetic professor made her drop mathematics as a subject. She graduated with her doctorate in 1906, having written her thesis on the conduction of heat in inhomogeneous solids.

She founded very little to no work in Vienna, so she moved to Berlin in 1907. She lived off an allowance from her kind and sympathetic parents. Meitner plan was to stay in Berlin for a year but she ended up staying for over thirty years, thus embarking on her great professional career.

She died on 27th October, 1968, a few days short of her 90th birthday.