Lise Meitner

Meitner was among the first women allowed to study at the University of Vienna, took a doctorate in physics in 1905, and moved to Berlin, where Max Planck admitted her to his lectures although he was on record as opposing women in universities. She worked with Otto Hahn for three decades, at first without pay and in a converted carpenter's workshop because women could not enter the institute proper. She became the first woman professor of physics in Germany.

Being Jewish by descent, she lost her post in 1938 and escaped to Sweden with the help of colleagues who smuggled her across the Dutch border. Months later, working from Hahn's letter about the unexplained barium, she and Otto Frisch calculated that a uranium nucleus had divided and that the missing mass had become energy, and named the process fission. Invited to Los Alamos, she said flatly that she would have nothing to do with a bomb. The Nobel went to Hahn alone. She spent her last years in Cambridge and is buried in the Hampshire village where her brother's family lived; her nephew's inscription calls her a physicist who never lost her humanity. Element 109 is named meitnerium.