Lise Meitner was born on the 7^th November 1878 in Vienna, Austria, the daughter of a successful and prosperous Vienna lawyer. She was a shy and retiring child, a personality trait that would be noteworthy later in life.

Her parents placed great value on education, and she was educated privately, by personal tutor. It was during her youth that she discovered her talent and interest in mathematics and physics. She focused on these two subjects, and was able to pass the entrance exams for Vienna university, a prestigious institution attended by such luminaries as Freud.

She entered the university in 1901, studying her two passions: mathematics and physics, but a difficult calculus problem and an unsympathetic professor made her drop mathematics as a subject.

Despite this setback, talented and inspiring lecturers such as Franz Exner and Ludwig Boltzman. She graduated with her doctorate in 1906, having written her thesis on the conduction of heat in inhomogenous solids. Although the topic was experimental, it was also highly theoretical, involving work by the great British physicist J. C. Maxwell.

Realising that there would be little work for her in Vienna, she moved to Berlin in 1907, living off an allowance from her generous and sympathetic parents. Despite intending only to stay a year, Meitner stayed for over thirty, thus embarking on her professional career.

The woman whom Einstein called 'The German Madame Curie' (a high honour indeed: both to be praised by Einstein, and to be compared to Curie) was always unassuming. 'I am not important: Why is everybody making such a fuss over me?' was one of her famous remarks. One story told about her, concerns a Hollywood plan to make a movie about the development of fission and the atomic bomb. She declared to a studio executive that she 'would rather walk the length of Broadway in the nude than see herself in a movie'.

Throughout her life, Lise Meitner's two great loves were music and walking in her beloved Austrian mountains. Although she became a Swedish citizen after moving there in July 1938, she always retained Austrian citizenship, and often remarked about how she missed the scenery of her native land.

Although she officially 'retired' in 1947, it was not until 1960 (at the age of 72) that she gave up working professionally, having moved to a little cottage in Cambridge, England in 1958. She died peacefully on the 27^th October 1968, a few days shy of her 90^th birthday.

Perhaps the greatest comfort during her life was the constant friendship of such great people as Niels Bohr and his wife Margarethe, Max Born, Max Planck, Wolfgang Pauli, James Chadwick and Albert Einstein.