Sir Rudolph Peierls (b.1907), British physicist. Peierls was educated at Berlin, then studied under Sommerfield, Heisenberg and Pauli. His research started in 1928 during the dawn of quantum physics. He studied heat conduction in non-metals, and developed the diamagnetic theory of metals. By 1938 he was studying nuclear physics, and was the first to show how resonances occur at particular beam energies in nuclear collisions. With Frisch he predicted the chain reaction that could be generated in a small amount of enriched uranium. By 1943, the work had moved to the Manhattan Project in America, where Peierls developed ways of isotope separation.