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, and in 1943 moved to the USA as part of the Manhattan Project designing isotope separation devices. Photographed in 1993.