Maria Goeppert Mayer
Mayer, Maria Goeppert (1906-1972), a German-born American physicist, shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in physics for her work on the shell structure of atomic nuclei.
Maria Goeppert was born in Kattowitz, Germany (now Katowice, Poland). Her father was the sixth generation of a family of university professors. He was also a doctor, and Maria's mother was a teacher.
Maria earned her Ph.D. degree in physics at the University of Gottingen in 1930. That year, she married Joseph Edward Mayer, an American chemist. The couple had two children.
After Joseph Mayer accepted a post at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the couple moved to the United States. In the 1930's, no university would hire the wife of a professor as a paid faculty member, so Maria Mayer taught there as a volunteer and earned a reputation as an outstanding chemical physicist. She became an American citizen in 1933.
In 1946, the couple moved to the Midwest. Maria Mayer worked at the University of Chicago as an unpaid physics professor in the Enrico Fermi Institute for Nuclear Studies. She also became a senior physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago.
In 1963, Mayer shared the Nobel Prize in physics with J. Hans Jensen of Germany and Eugene Paul Wigner of the United States. Mayer and Jensen, working independently, discovered that atomic nuclei possess shells similar to the electron shells of atoms. Their varying numbers of protons and neutrons permit systematic arrangement of nuclei according to their properties. Mayer was the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in physics, following French physicist Marie Sklodowska Curie.
In 1960, Mayer and her husband joined the faculty of the University of California, San Diego.