Maria Goeppert was born on June 28, 1906 in Kattowiz, Upper Silesia, then a part of Germany. Her father was a professor of pediatrics, the sixth generation of Goepperts to be university professors. When Maria was four years old, the family moved to Göttingen where her father joined the faculty at the university.
Like most women scientists, Goeppert-Mayer encountered special problems and barriers from the time she entered the educational system in Göttingen. There was no public school at which girls could prepare for the university. So she enrolled at the Frauenstudium, a small private school operated by suffragettes to prepare girls for the university. When the school closed, a few teachers continued to tutor Goeppert-Mayer privately for the university entrance exams.
In 1924, Goeppert-Mayer passed her exams and entered the university. Her initial interest was in the area of mathematics. But contact with Max Born caused her to shift her major to physics. She received her doctorate after six years at Göttingen; the same year, she married Joseph Mayer, an American graduate student studying in Germany. The Mayers moved to Baltimore, where Joseph had accepted an appointment in the chemistry department at Johns Hopkins University. Maria chose to use the name Goeppert-Mayer after her marriage.
At the time of Joseph's appointment, most educational institutions refused to hire both husband and wife, so Goeppert-Mayer could not get an appointment also. She was, however, allowed to use university facilities and offer informal seminars. The situation was no different at Columbia University, where Joseph accepted an appointment in 1939. Two years later, Goeppert-Mayer accepted her first formal teaching assignment, a half-time position at Sarah Lawrence College. During World War II, she worked on Columbia's Substitute Alloy Materials Project developing methods for separating uranium isotopes for atomic bomb production.
After the war, the Mayers moved to the University of Chicago, where Goeppert-Mayer was finally offered a full-time position as professor of physics. It was there that she did the research that led to her 1963 Nobel Prize for physics, shared with Hans Jensen.
The prize was given for Goeppert-Mayer's theory of nuclear shells. Scientists had long known that certain isotopes appear to be unusually stable. These isotopes all had 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, or 126 protons or neutrons. These numbers came to be known as "magic numbers."
To Goeppert-Mayer, the existence of magic numbers suggested that protons and neutrons in the nucleus might be arranged in specific energy levels, like those available to electrons in an atom. A similar idea had been suggested by Walter Elsasser in 1934. But Goeppert-Mayer had more data at her disposal and was able to develop a more sophisticated model of nuclear shells. Jensen, a German physicist, suggested a similar model independently at about the same time.
In 1960, Goeppert-Mayer and her husband accepted positions at the University of California at La Jolla, she in physics and he in chemistry. Shortly after arriving in California, she suffered a stroke and her output of scientific research declined. She continued to teach, write, and do some research, however, until her death on February 20, 1972.
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