Maria Goeppert Mayer

Maria Goeppert Mayer

Born: June 28, 1906, Kattowitz, German Empire, now Katowice, Poland

Died: February 20, 1972 (aged 65), San Diego, California.

Maria Goeppert Mayer, née Göppert was a German-American theoretical physicist. For most of her career, Maria Goeppert Mayer worked “just for the fun of doing physics,” without pay or status or a tenured position. She was 58 before she became a full professor. And yet she made major contributions to the growing understanding of nuclear physics, including the revelatory nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus, for which she won the Nobel Prize in Physics, only the second woman to do so, the first being Marie Curie. In 1986, the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award for early-career women physicists was established in her honor.

Maria Göppert was born in Kattowitz (now Katowice, Poland), a Silesian city in the former Kingdom of Prussia, the only child of paediatrician Friedrich Göppert and his wife Maria née Wolff. In 1910, she moved with her family to Göttingen when her father, a sixth-generation university professor, was appointed as the professor of pediatrics at the University of Göttingen. Göppert was closer to her father than to her mother. “Well, my father was more interesting”, she later explained. “He was after all a scientist”.

Göppert was educated in Göttingen at a school for middle-class girls who aspired to higher education. In 1921, she entered a private high school run by suffragettes that aimed to prepare girls for university. She took the university entrance examination, at age 17, a year early, with three or four girls from her school and thirty boys. All the girls passed, but only one of the boys did.

In the spring of 1924, Göppert entered the University of Göttingen, where she studied mathematics. She spent one year at Cambridge university, in England, before returning to Göttingen. A purported shortage of women mathematics teachers for schools for girls led to an upsurge of women studying mathematics at a time of high unemployment, and there was even a female professor of mathematics at Göttingen, Emmy Noether, but most were only interested in qualifying for their teaching certificates.

Maria Goeppert became interested in physics and chose to pursue a PhD at the University of Göttingen under a committee of three Nobel Prize winners, becoming an expert in quantum chemistry during her studies. She received her doctorate in 1930 with a thesis on two-photon absorption by atoms. Eugene Wigner later described the thesis as “a masterpiece of clarity and concreteness”. At the time, the chances of experimentally verifying her thesis seemed remote, but the development of the laser permitted the first experimental verification in 1961 when two-photon-excited fluorescence was detected in a europium-doped crystal.

In 1930 she married the American chemical physicist Joseph E. Mayer, and a short time later she accompanied him to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. They had two children. Due to the nepotism rules prevalent at the time, Goeppert Mayer was unable to work as a faculty member and was instead hired as an unpaid volunteer associate in the physics department for the next nine years. Still, she continued to do research, publishing an important paper on double beta decay, and collaborating with Karl Herzfeld on several papers in the field of chemical physics. She became a U.S. citizen in 1933. In 1939 she and her husband both received appointments in chemistry at Columbia University, where Maria Mayer worked on the separation of uranium isotopes for the Manhattan Project. The Mayers published the textbook, “Statistical Mechanics” in 1940. Although they remained at Columbia throughout World War II, Maria Mayer also lectured at Sarah Lawrence College (1942–45). There’s no mention of whether she was paid for this. I assume she was.

After the war Mayer’s interests centered increasingly on nuclear physics. In 1946, the couple moved to the University of Chicago where her husband had been appointed a professor in the Department of Chemistry. Goeppert Mayer joined the Institute for Nuclear Studies (now the Enrico Fermi Institute). Again, Goeppert Mayer faced nepotism laws, and thus taught courses in the Department of Physics and supervised several graduate students on a voluntary basis. It was not until she accepted an offer from her first graduate student, Robert G. Sachs, for a half-time appointment as a senior physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, that she was paid for her scientific work. At Argonne, she expanded her expertise in complex mathematics into nuclear physics and investigated nuclear properties across the periodic table.

From 1948 to 1949 Mayer published several papers concerning the stability and configuration of protons and neutrons that constitute the atomic nucleus. In 1949, Goeppert Mayer and Hans Jensen, working independently, developed a quantum model of the internal structure of atomic nuclei wherein nucleons were distributed in shells with different energy levels, echoing the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom’s electronic structure. This development explained many features of nuclear stability for the first time. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1963 for this discovery. Goeppert Mayer was the first American woman to win the award, and only the second woman after Marie Curie. This work established her as a leading authority in the field, she was also noted for her work in quantum electrodynamics and spectroscopy. In 1960, she began her first paid full professorship at University of California, San Diego, where she continued to work through 1965.

In 1960, Goeppert Mayer was appointed full professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. Although she suffered from a stroke shortly after arriving there, she continued to teach and conduct research for a number of years. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1965. Goeppert Mayer died in San Diego, California, on February 20, 1972, after a heart attack that had struck her the previous year left her comatose. She was buried at El Camino Memorial Park in San Diego.