Rudolf Peierls

Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls was a German-born British physicist, born in 1907, who played a major role in Tube Alloys, the British nuclear weapon programme, and in the Manhattan Project. He studied at Berlin, Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld, Leipzig under Werner Heisenberg and Zurich under Wolfgang Pauli, received his DPhil from Leipzig in 1929, and later studied under Enrico Fermi in Rome and Ralph H. Fowler at Cambridge. He stayed in Britain after the rise of Hitler, worked with Hans Bethe, and in 1937 took a new chair in applied mathematics at the University of Birmingham. In 1940 he co-authored the Frisch-Peierls memorandum with Otto Robert Frisch.