Maria Goeppert Mayer

Maria Goeppert Mayer was a German-American theoretical physicist who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics alongside J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Wigner. She and Jensen shared one half of the prize for their work on nuclear shell structure. She was only the second woman ever to receive the Nobel in Physics, after Marie Curie in 1903. In her honor, the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award was created in 1986 to support women physicists early in their careers.

She earned her doctorate from the University of Göttingen, where her thesis explored the theoretical possibility of two-photon absorption by atoms. At the time, verifying this idea experimentally seemed unlikely, but the invention of the laser in the 1960s made it possible. Today, the unit used to measure two-photon absorption cross sections is called the Goeppert Mayer (GM) unit.

After marrying American chemist Joseph Edward Mayer, she moved to the United States. Because Johns Hopkins University had strict anti-nepotism rules, she could not join the faculty there, but she worked as an assistant and published a key paper on double beta decay in 1935. In 1937, she moved to Columbia University, where she worked without pay. During World War II, she contributed to the Manhattan Project at Columbia, focusing on isotope separation, and later worked with Edward Teller at Los Alamos on thermonuclear weapons.

After the war, she became a voluntary associate professor of physics at the University of Chicago—where her husband and Teller were based—and also served as a senior physicist at the university’s Argonne National Laboratory. There, she developed a mathematical model for nuclear shell structure, which earned her the Nobel Prize in 1963. In 1960, she was appointed a full professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego.

Born Maria Göppert on June 28, 1906, in Kattowitz, Germany (now Katowice, Poland), she was the only child of pediatrician Friedrich Göppert and Maria Wolff. Her family moved to Göttingen in 1910 when her father became a professor of pediatrics at the university. She felt closer to her father, explaining that he was more interesting because he was a scientist.

She attended the Höhere Technische in Göttingen, a school for middle-class girls aiming for higher education, and later enrolled at the Frauenstudium, a private high school run by suffragettes that prepared girls for university. She took the Abitur exam at age 17, a year early, alongside three or four other girls and thirty boys; all the girls passed, but only one boy did.

In spring 1924, she began studying mathematics at the University of Göttingen, spending a year at Cambridge University before returning. At the time, a shortage of women math teachers for girls’ schools had drawn many women to study mathematics, including the prominent mathematician Emmy Noether, but most were only seeking teaching qualifications. Goeppert Mayer, however, became interested in physics and pursued a PhD instead. Her 1931 thesis on two-photon absorption was later called “a masterpiece of clarity and concreteness” by Eugene Wigner. The first experimental verification came in 1961 using a europium-doped crystal and laser excitation. The unit for two-photon absorption cross section, the GM, honors her work. Her thesis examiners were three Nobel laureates: Max Born, James Franck, and Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus.

She married Joseph Edward Mayer on January 19, 1930; he was an American Rockefeller fellow and an assistant to James Franck. They had met when he boarded with her family. The couple moved to the United States, where he became an associate professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins. They had two children, Maria Ann and Peter Conrad. Because of nepotism rules, she could not be hired as faculty, but she worked as an assistant in the physics department, handling German correspondence for a small salary, and had access to lab facilities. She taught some courses and published her important 1935 paper on double beta decay.

At Johns Hopkins, there was little interest in quantum mechanics, but she collaborated with Karl Herzfeld on several papers, including one on the benzene spectrum with his student A. L. Sklar. She also returned to Göttingen in the summers of 1931, 1932, and 1933 to work with her former examiner Born on an article for the Handbuch der Physik. That collaboration ended when the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, forcing many academics, including Born and Franck, from their positions. Concerned by the anti-Jewish laws, Goeppert Mayer and Herzfeld became involved in efforts to help displaced scholars.