Professor Rudolf Peierls, c mid-20th century

Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, born 5 June 1907, died 19 September 1995 was a German-born British physicist who played a major role in Tube Alloys, Britain's nuclear project, and also the Manhattan Project. He studied at the Universities Berlin, Munich, Leipzig and ETH Zurich. He received his doctorate from Leipzig in 1929 and worked under Wolfgang Pauli. Peierls married Eugenia Nikolaievna Kannegiesser in 1931, they had four children. In 1932, under the Rockefeller Fellowship, he studied in Rome under Enrico Fermi, and then also at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. As he was Jewish, he chose not to return to Germany after the Nazi's rise to power in 1933, and stayed in Britain, working at the Universities of Manchester, Cambridge, and Birmingham. After the war, during which he worked on the Manhattan Project, he worked at the University of Birmingham until 1963, and then at New College, Oxford until his retirement in 1974. Peierls received a knighthood in 1968. Peierls received many awards, including the Medal of Freedom (1946), the Royal Medal (1959), the Max Planck Medal (1963), the Enrico Fermi Award (1980), and Copley Medal (1986). Peierls died in 1995, aged 88.