Lise Meitner (1878-1968) studied physics and mathematics in Vienna and, in 1906, was the second woman to receive her PhD in physics from the University of Vienna. The following year she left for Berlin, where she became an assistant under Max Planck and worked closely with Otto Hahn, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for his discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei”, on radioactivity and nuclear fission. In 1938 Meitner emigrated to Stockholm, where she worked until her retirement in 1960.

Victor Franz Hess (1883-1964) worked as an assistant in Vienna from 1906 to 1920, first under Franz Serafin Exner at the University of Vienna, where he received his habilitation, then under Stefan Meyer at the newly established Institute for Radium Research next door. He later held professorships in Graz, Innsbruck and, after his emigration in 1938, at Fordham University (New York). Hess was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1936 for his discovery of cosmic radiation.

Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) studied physics at the University of Vienna from 1906-1910, where he took up an assistant position in 1911. In 1920, he became extraordinary professor at the University of Jena. Further appointments took him to Breslau, Zürich, Berlin, Oxford, Graz and Dublin. He returned to Vienna in 1956, where he served as professor of theoretical physics at our faculty until his death in 1961. Schrödinger, jointly with Paul Dirac, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 “for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory”.

Hans Thirring (1888-1976) studied physics and mathematics at the University of Vienna, where he served as assistant, professor and head of the Institute for Theoretical Physics until his forced retirement in 1938 after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. In 1946, after the end of World War II, Thirring was reinstated and served as dean of the philosophical faculty of the University of Vienna in 1946/47.