Maria Goeppert Mayer

Maria Goeppert Mayer
Mayer in 1963
Born	Maria Göppert (1906-06-28)June 28, 1906 Kattowitz, Prussia, German Empire
Died	February 20, 1972(1972-02-20) (aged 65) San Diego, California, U.S.
Citizenship	Germany United States
Alma mater	University of Göttingen
Known for	Double beta decay Magic number Nuclear shell model Two-photon absorption Goeppert Mayer unit
Spouse	Joseph Edward Mayer ​ (m. 1930)​
Children	2
Parents	Friedrich Göppert Maria Wolff
Awards	Nobel Prize in Physics (1963)
Scientific career
Fields	Physics
Institutions	Sarah Lawrence College Columbia University Los Alamos Laboratory Argonne National Laboratory University of California, San Diego University of Chicago
Doctoral advisor	Max Born
Doctoral students	Robert G. Sachs
Signature

Maria Goeppert Mayer (German: [maˈʁiːa ˈɡœpɐt ˈmaɪɐ] ^ⓘ; née Göppert; June 28, 1906 – February 20, 1972) was a German-American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. She was the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, the first being Marie Curie. In 1986, the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award for early-career women physicists was established in her honor.

A graduate of the University of Göttingen, Goeppert Mayer wrote her doctoral thesis on the theory of possible two-photon absorption by atoms. At the time, the chances of experimentally verifying her thesis seemed remote, but the development of the laser in the 1960s later permitted this. Today, the unit for the two-photon absorption cross section is named the Goeppert Mayer (GM) unit.

Maria Goeppert married chemist Joseph Edward Mayer and moved to the United States, where he was an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University. Strict rules against nepotism prevented Johns Hopkins University from taking her on as a faculty member, but she was given a job as an assistant and published a landmark paper on double beta decay in 1935. In 1937, she moved to Columbia University, where she took an unpaid position. During World War II, she worked for the Manhattan Project at Columbia on isotope separation, and with Edward Teller at the Los Alamos Laboratory on the development of thermonuclear weapons.

After the war, Goeppert Mayer became a voluntary associate professor of physics at the University of Chicago (where her husband and Teller worked) and a senior physicist at the university-run Argonne National Laboratory. She developed a mathematical model for the structure of nuclear shells, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963, which she shared with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Wigner. In 1960, she was appointed full professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego.