Maria Goeppert Mayer

Origins and early life

Maria Göppert was born on 28 June 1906 in Kattowitz, then in Germany and today Katowice in Poland, the only child of the paediatrician Friedrich Göppert and of Maria Wolff. Her paternal grandfather, the law professor Heinrich Robert Göppert, had married Gertrud Landsberg, the daughter of a Breslau city councillor from the well-known Jewish Landsberg family; both her parents were Protestants, and her place in this directory rests on descent, through that grandmother.

The family moved to Göttingen in 1910, and there she turned from mathematics to physics under Max Born and took her doctorate in 1930, with a thesis on two-photon absorption.

Work and career

That year she married the American chemist Joseph Edward Mayer and followed him to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where rules against employing professors' wives left her only an assistant's post. From 1933, when the Nazi laws drove professors of Jewish descent out of German universities, she and Karl Herzfeld took part in the relief of refugee scholars. At Columbia University she worked during the war on separating the isotopes of uranium, and in 1946 she moved to Chicago, unpaid by the university but a senior physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory.

From 1948 she sought to explain why nuclei with certain magic numbers of protons or neutrons are unusually stable, and in 1949, prompted by a question from Enrico Fermi, she showed that the nucleus is built of closed shells.

Recognition

In 1960 she became a full professor at the University of California in San Diego, and in 1963 she shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physics with a German physicist who had reached the same model independently, for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure, the other half going to Eugene Wigner. She was the second woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics, after Marie Curie, and she died in San Diego on 20 February 1972.