Awards and Honours
On 15 November 1945 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Hahn had been awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission. Some historians who have documented the history of the discovery of nuclear fission believe Meitner should have been awarded the Nobel Prize with Hahn.
On a visit to the USA in 1946, she received the honour of "Woman of the Year" by the National Press Club and had dinner with President Harry Truman and others at the National Women's Press Club. She lectured at Princeton, Harvard and other US universities, and was awarded a number of honorary doctorates. Lise Meitner refused to move back to Germany, and enjoyed retirement and research in Stockholm until her late 80s. She received the Max Planck Medal of the German Physics Society in 1949. Meitner was nominated to receive the prize three times. An even rarer honour was given to her in 1997 when element 109 was named meitnerium in her honour. Named after Meitner were the Hahn-Meitner Institut in Berlin, craters on the Moon and on Venus, and a main-belt asteroid.
Meitner was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1945, and had her status changed to that of a Swedish member in 1951.
In 1966 Hahn, Fritz Strassmann and Meitner were jointly awarded the Enrico Fermi Award.
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—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)