Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1906–1972)

Maria Goeppert Mayer was born in Kattowitz, Germany (present day Katowice, Poland), the daughter of Friedrich Goeppert and his wife Maria Wolff. She spent most of her childhood in Göttingen, where her father was a professor of pediatrics at the university. In 1924, she enrolled herself at the University at Göttingen, with the intention of becoming a mathematician. Soon she found herself more attracted to physics, and earned a doctorate in theoretical physics in 1930. That same year, she married Joseph E. Mayer, an American chemical physicist, with whom she would have two children, and accompanied him to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. As a volunteer during the Great Depression, she collaborated with Karl Herzfeld and with her husband on the study of organic molecules. In 1939, the couple each received faculty appointments in chemistry at Columbia University, where she worked on the separation of uranium isotopes for the secret U.S. atomic bomb project. In 1940, the Mayers published the book Statistical Mechanics. Dr. Goeppert Mayer also taught at Sarah Lawrence College between 1941 and 1945. After World War II, they went to the University of Chicago, where she was named a professor in the Physics Department, and served as a volunteer professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute for Nuclear Studies. She also worked for the Argonne National Laboratory. From 1948 to 1949, she published several papers concerning the stability and configuration of protons and neutrons that constitute the atomic nucleus. She developed a theory that the nucleus consists of several shells, or orbital levels. A similar theory was proposed around the same time in West Germany by J. Hans D. Jensen, with whom she subsequently co-wrote the book Elementary Theory of Nuclear Shell Structure (1955). The work established her as a leading authority in the field. In 1963, they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Eugene P. Wigner.