100th birthday - Austria / II. Republic of Austria 1978 - 6 Shilling

Lise Meitner was born in Vienna on 7 November 1878 as the daughter of a lawyer. She studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna; her teachers were Ludwig Bolzmann and Franz Exner. In 1906 she earned her doctorate as a second woman with a major in physics, then she passed the teaching examination for middle schools. At the end of this year, she went to Berlin to deepen her knowledge of theoretical physics with the founder of quantum theory, later Nobel laureate Max Planck. There she devoted herself mainly to problems of radioactivity. She worked closely with Otto Hahn and developed excellent work to clarify the radioactive decay. In 1919 she succeeded, together with Hahn, in the discovery of a new element, the protactinium. After the discovery of artificial radioactivity by the couple Pierre Curie and Marie Sklodowska in Paris and the first attempts of Enrico Fermi to produce radioactive atom species by neutron irradiation, Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn also turned their interest in this new area. In 1938, when she had to leave Berlin because of the National Socialists, she could look back on an extremely successful scientific activity. From now on she lived permanently in Stockholm and died on October 27, 1968.