Rudolf Ernst Peierls was born in the Berlin suburb of Oberschöneweide, the youngest of three children of Heinrich … See more

Peierls accepted an offer from Pauli to become his assistant in place of Felix Bloch. Lev Landau was there at this time on a scholarship from the government of the Soviet Union, and Peierls and Landau became frie… See more

In 1932, Peierls was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship to study abroad, which he used to study in Rome under Enrico Fermi, and then at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in England under Ralph H. F… See more

After the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Peierls started working on nuclear weapons research with Otto Robert Frisch, a fellow refugee from Germany. Ironically, they were excluded from the wo… See more

Physicists were in demand after the war, and Peierls received offers from several universities. He seriously considered an offer of a position at Cambridge from William Lawrence Bragg, but decided to return to Bi… See more

Peierls was knighted in the 1968 Birthday Honours. He was awarded the Rutherford Memorial Medal in 1952, the Royal Medal in 1959, the Lorentz Medal in 1962, the Max Planck Medal in 1963, the Guthrie Medal and Prize in … See more