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Person

Otto Frisch

A man wearing glasses, a dark suit with a patterned tie, and a white pocket square stands against a dark background.

Austrian-British physicist, 1904–1979, and Lise Meitner's nephew. Working at Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen, he visited his aunt at Christmas 1938 and helped her interpret Hahn's barium result. He coined the word fission, borrowing it from cell biology. Later, at Birmingham with Rudolf Peierls, he calculated the critical mass for a uranium bomb — the memorandum that launched the Allied weapons effort.

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