Women in Science

M. Goeppert-Mayer

Physicist

Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1906-1972) grew up in Göttingen, Germany, at a time when its university was becoming one of the principal hotbeds of twentieth-century theoretical physics. Heir to six generations of university professors, Geoppert-Mayer had planned to study and teach mathematics, but found herself more drawn to the mysterious relations of matter and energy illuminated by the new quantum physics. She studied with one of htis key exponents, Max Born, gaining her doctorate in 1930, and thereafter lived and worked in the U.S. with her husband, also a scientist. Geoppert-Mayer provided isotope-separation research for the Manhattan Project before joining Enrico Fermi at the Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago in 1948. There she posited her "shell-model" of atomic nuclei, which fundamentally clarified the relationship between nuclear properties and periodicity in their components' arrangement. A landmark in the development of nuclear physics, Geoppert-Mayer's shell model gained her and collaborator Hans Hensen the Nobel Prize in physics for 1963.

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Information Source: Publication Department of the Library of Congress. Photograph courtesy New York World-Telegram and Sun Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.