Scientist. Born in Vienna, he inherited his aunt's love of physics and studied at the University of Vienna, graduating in 1926 after discovering the effect of the newly discovered electron on salts. After years working in laboratories in Germany, he attained a position in Hamburg under the Nobel Prize winning scientist Otto Stern. There he produced novel work on the diffraction of atoms (using crystal surfaces) and that the magnetic moment of the proton was much larger than had been previously thought. After Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, he moved to London where he joined the staff at Birkbeck College and worked with the physicist Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett on cloud chamber technology and artificial radioactivity. He followed this with a five year job in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr where he specialized in nuclear neutron physics. In the Summer of 1939 Frisch left Denmark for a short trip to Birmingham, but the outbreak of World War II delayed his return. With war on the mind of everyone, he was working with the physicist Sir Rudolph Ernst Peierls and produced the Frisch-Peierls memorandum which was the first document to set out a process by which an atomic explosion could be generated by using separated Uranium-235. He successfully worked on the Manhattan Project as part of the British delegation and finally went to America in 1943 having been quickly made a British citizen. In 1946 he returned to England to take up the post of head of the nuclear physics division of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, though he also spent much of the next thirty years teaching at Cambridge where he was Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy and a fellow of Trinity College. He retired from the chair in 1972 to work on his books and business interest. Among his awards and honors, the two bestowed upon him by his adopted home were most appreciated: the Order of the British Empire Medal of Freedom (1946) and his election to the Royal Society (1948).