Rudolf Peierls (5 June 1907-19 September 1995) was a German-British physicist who played a major role in the nuclear programs of both the United States and the United Kingdom.
Biography[]
Rudolf Peierls was born in Berlin, German Empire to an assimilated Jewish family of the Lutheran faith in 1907. He studied physics at the University of Berlin, at the University of Munich, at the University of Leipzig, and ETH Zurich, and he used a 1932 Rockefeller Fellowship to study under Enrico Fermi in Rome. Due to Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Peierls decided to make his residence in United Kingdom permanent, and he and Otto Robert Frisch researched the atomic bomb during World War II. He played a major role in the United States' Manhattan Project and Britain's Tube Alloys projects (recruiting the future spy Klaus Fuchs), and he worked at the University of Birmingham until 1963 and then at Oxford until 1974. He died in 1995.