Professor David Peimer and Jeffrey Cohen
Three Remarkable Women Scientists: Marie Curie, Mileva Einstein, Lisa Meitner
Summary
In this lecture we will explore the lives and work of three of the most extraordinary women scientists of the last century: Marie Curie (1867–1934) was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize and the first person to win it twice; Mileva Einstein (1875–1948) was Albert Einstein’s first wife and an outstanding physicist and mathematician who helped him immensely with his work; and Lisa Meitner (1878–1968), a brilliant physicist who was instrumental in the discovery of nuclear fission.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Jeffrey Cohen
Jeffrey Cohen, born in Cape Town, South Africa, is a dedicated educator with a distinguished career spanning multiple countries. He graduated from the Universities of Cape Town and Columbia, the latter on a Fulbright Scholarship, specialising in Philosophy, Mathematics, and Education. From 1981 to 1991, excluding a year teaching in New York, he taught Mathematics in Cape Town townships. He later served as Principal of Herzlia High School in Cape Town (1997–2002), Kadimah College in Auckland, and Masada College in Sydney, Australia. Additionally, he has been Head of Middle School at Moriah College in Sydney and continues to teach Mathematics there. Deeply interested in Judaism and its ethics, Mathematics, and the natural sciences, he is an admirer of the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks Z"L.