Harris & Ewing · Public domain

Co-discovered protactinium in 1918 and, two decades later, was the physicist who worked out the physics behind nuclear fission with her nephew Otto Frisch — a discovery credited to her collaborator Otto Hahn alone when he won the 1944 Nobel Prize, in what is now widely regarded as one of the Nobel committee's worst omissions. Born into a Jewish family in Vienna and baptised a Lutheran in 1908, she stopped practising Judaism as an adult; Nazi racial law classified her as Jewish regardless, and she fled Germany for Sweden in 1938 with two days' warning.