Maria Goeppert-Mayer

Maria Goeppert-Mayer (Katowice, June 28, 1906-San Diego, California, February 20, 1972) was an American theoretical physicist of German origin, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 for proposing the nuclear shell model. She was the second woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics after Marie Curie.

Career

Maria Goeppert was born in Kattowitz (now Katowice), then part of the Silesian province of the German Empire. Her family moved to Göttingen in 1910, when her father Friedrich Goeppert was appointed Professor of Pediatrics at the Göttingen University.

On his father's side, Goeppert-Mayer came from a family with a long academic tradition. From an early age, she was surrounded by the students and professors of the university, eminent intellectuals including scientists such as Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac and Wolfgang Pauli.

In 1920, Goeppert enrolled at the University of Göttingen. Among his teachers were three future Nobel laureates: Max Born, James Franck and Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus.

Goeppert completed her doctor of physics (Ph.D.) degree at the University of Göttingen in 1930, and in the same year, she married Joseph Edward Mayer, then an assistant to James Franck. The new couple moved to the United States, Mayer's country of origin, specifically to Baltimore, where he had his position as a professor at Johns Hopkins University.

In his doctoral thesis, he calculated the probability that an atom would be able to absorb two photons simultaneously and excite the atom just as a single photon with energy equal to the sum of the energy of both photons would do. His wild theory was confirmed experimentally in the 1960s with the advent of the laser.

At that University (1931-39), as later at Columbia University (1940-46) and Chicago University, where her husband was hired, Maria Goeppert-Mayer was allowed to work as a volunteer researcher but without being entitled to remuneration, largely due to sexism but also due to the strict rules against nepotism.

Indeed, despite her worth and ability, almost her entire career was spent as an unpaid volunteer teacher and researcher, not reaching a full-time paid position until she was 53 years old.

Despite this, she was able to develop brilliant research work and find other job opportunities, including a teaching position at Sarah Lawrence College.

He was also able to collaborate, although in a rather secondary line of research, in the Manhattan Project for the development of the atomic bomb in Los Álamos (New Mexico).

During her husband's time as a professor at the University of Chicago, Goeppert-Mayer was a volunteer Associate Professor of Physics (without pay). Also, when the nearby Argonne National Laboratory was founded in 1946, Goeppert-Mayer volunteered to work there part-time in the Division of Theoretical Physics. It was during her time in Chicago and Argonne that she developed the mathematical calculation that demonstrated the nuclear shell model, work for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963, shared with German researchers J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Paul Wigner.

The German scientists with whom he shared the prize worked in parallel on exactly the same theory. After publishing their results, Goeppert-Mayer collaborated with them. A member of the German team, J. Hans D. Jensen, went to the United States and worked with her to edit a book in 1950 entitled Elementary Theory of Nuclear Shell Structure.

In 1963, both were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for their discoveries on the structure of nuclear shells." In his acceptance speech, Goeppert-Mayer said, "Winning the award has been half as exciting as doing the job."

When the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that she had won the Nobel Prize, a local San Diego newspaper headlined the story with the phrase ""Mother from San Diego wins the Nobel Prize".

In 1960, Goeppert-Mayer was appointed to a position as Professor (full-time) of Physics at the University of California at San Diego and they moved to neighboring La Jolla. Despite the fact that she suffered a stroke shortly after arriving there, she continued to teach and research for several years.