Maria Goeppert Mayer

Maria Goeppert was born on June 28, 1906, in Kattowitz, then in the German Empire (now Katowice, Poland), into a family of academics. Her father, Friedrich Goeppert, was a professor of pediatrics, and her mother, Maria Wolf, had been a teacher. She entered the University of Göttingen in 1924, where she studied mathematics and physics, earning her doctorate in 1930 under Max Born on the theory of double-photon absorption.¹ At Göttingen she met the American chemist Joseph Edward Mayer, whom she married in 1930; the couple moved to the United States, where she faced significant barriers to academic employment because of anti-nepotism rules and gender discrimination.²

Despite holding unpaid or part-time positions at Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and the University of Chicago, Goeppert Mayer produced influential work in physical chemistry and nuclear physics. In 1948, while at the University of Chicago and the Argonne National Laboratory, she began investigating the "magic numbers" of nucleons that correspond to unusually stable nuclei. In 1949 she published a paper proposing that these numbers arise from a strong spin–orbit coupling in the nuclear shell model, independently arriving at the same conclusion as Hans Jensen.³ Her model explained the stability of nuclei with 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, and 126 protons or neutrons, and it became a cornerstone of nuclear physics. In 1963 she shared the Nobel Prize with Jensen and Eugene Wigner.⁴

In 1960, Goeppert Mayer was appointed full professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, where she taught until her death. She received numerous honors, including election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1956 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1964.⁵ Her Nobel Prize in 1963 made her only the second woman to win in physics, and she was also the third woman to win any Nobel science prize. She died in San Diego on February 20, 1972, from heart failure.⁶

Beyond the shell model, Goeppert Mayer made significant contributions to other fields. Her 1930 doctoral thesis predicted two-photon absorption, a phenomenon not experimentally confirmed until 1961 with the advent of lasers.⁷ During World War II, she worked on the Manhattan Project, where she contributed to the separation of uranium isotopes and the theory of the chemical properties of plutonium. She also collaborated with her husband on the influential textbook Statistical Mechanics (1940).⁸ Despite her achievements, she never received a paid faculty position until 1960, and she often worked as a volunteer researcher. The Maria Goeppert Mayer Award of the American Physical Society, established in 1986, honors outstanding women physicists in her memory.⁵

Nuclear shell model

A model of the atomic nucleus in which protons and neutrons occupy discrete energy levels, analogous to electron shells in atoms.

Magic numbers

Numbers of nucleons (2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, 126) that result in particularly stable nuclei.

Spin–orbit coupling

An interaction between a particle's spin and its orbital motion, crucial for explaining the magic numbers.