Named for Lise Meitner

Meitnerium honours Lise Meitner, the Austrian-Swedish physicist who, having fled Nazi Germany, worked out with her nephew Otto Frisch the correct interpretation of the experiments of her former colleague Otto Hahn, recognising that the uranium nucleus had split, and coining the term fission. Hahn alone received the Nobel Prize for the discovery, in one of the most criticised omissions in the history of the award, and the naming of element 109 for Meitner is often seen as a measure of restitution. She is one of very few women, alongside Marie Curie, to have an element named for her. Meitnerium has no ancient or esoteric tradition, being a synthetic element of the 1980s; its name carries a note of historical justice, honouring a physicist long denied her due for one of the pivotal discoveries of the age.

Later historical research into the Nobel committee's own archives, opened to scholars decades after the fact under Sweden's disclosure rules, confirmed that Meitner had been seriously considered and repeatedly nominated for the prize in multiple years, strengthening the now-widespread scholarly judgement that her exclusion reflected the limited recognition available to women physicists of her era rather than any real doubt about her scientific contribution.