Women Scientists

Maria Goeppert Mayer 1906-1977

At a glance:

US physicist who won a Nobel Prize for her work on the structure of the atomic nucleus

Maria Goeppert was born in Silesia and educated at Goettingen University in Germany, then the most exciting place to work for theoretical physicists. She was taught by three Nobel prize winners and her fellow students and lecturers included famous physicists Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi and Werner Heisenberg. But when she married American chemist Joe Mayer and they emigrated to America in 1930, she could not get a job at Johns Hopkins University where her husband worked and it was to be 1941 before she managed to get a part time job teaching science. She did other voluntary or unofficial jobs including working for Edward Teller at Los Alamos for instance. When Joe Mayer moved to the University of Chicago, strict rules against hiring wives meant no job once again. She was given a job a part time job as a theoretical physicist with the newly formed Argonne Laboratory. There she developed the nuclear shell model, showing how the atom was arranged, including a description of magic numbers in nuclei (those arrangements of protons and neutrons which confer most stability). She and Hans Jensen were jointly awarded the Nobel prize for this work.
Maria Goeppert Mayer

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