Maria Goeppert Mayer

Maria Goeppert grew up in Göttingen, the seventh generation of her father's family to hold a university professorship, and expected to be the eighth. She passed her exams at seventeen ahead of the boys in her class, then switched from mathematics to physics at the University of Göttingen, where her doctoral committee included three future Nobel laureates. In 1930 she married the American chemist Joseph Mayer and moved to Baltimore for his job at Johns Hopkins, where nepotism rules that existed mainly to keep faculty wives out of the classroom kept her unpaid. She kept working anyway, on whatever problem she could attach herself to, for the next two decades.

For years Mayer held titles like volunteer and voluntary associate while doing real physics, first at Johns Hopkins, then at Columbia, where she worked with Enrico Fermi, then during the war on uranium separation and, at Los Alamos under Edward Teller, the physics of a thermonuclear bomb. Her first paying university post came in 1946, at the University of Chicago, unpaid officially but real in practice, alongside Fermi and Teller again. There she worked out why certain numbers of protons and neutrons make some atomic nuclei unusually stable, describing the nucleus as dancers moving in nested circles, some clockwise, some not. German physicists reached the same model within weeks of her own paper. In 1963 she and Hans Jensen shared the Nobel Prize in Physics, the second ever given to a woman.

A San Diego newspaper announced her Nobel Prize with the headline 'S.D. Mother Wins Nobel Prize,' and the sentence captures three decades of how her work got read: as a hobby that happened to succeed. Johns Hopkins, Columbia and the University of Chicago all found ways to use her physics without paying for it, on the reasoning that a professor's wife did not need a salary, and she did not fight the arrangement so much as work around it, chasing whichever laboratory would let her in. When the University of California, San Diego finally gave her a full professorship in 1960, on her own name and her own line, she was fifty-four and had already done the work the Nobel committee would cite three years later.

Mayer suffered a stroke soon after reaching San Diego and kept teaching and researching regardless until her death from a heart attack on February 20, 1972, at sixty-five. Physics has spent the decades since trying to make the earlier neglect visible rather than repeat it: the unit for two-photon absorption she helped define now carries her name, so does an award for early-career women physicists, and Argonne National Laboratory, where she once worked without a formal position, is now a historic site in her honor. No woman won the physics Nobel again for fifty-five years, until Donna Strickland in 2018.

Maria Goeppert Mayer's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Doctoral thesis on two-photon absorption discovery
  Later the theoretical basis for two-photon microscopy 1930
• Paper on double beta decay article
  Written while an unpaid research associate at Johns Hopkins 1935
• Uranium-235 separation research mission
  Manhattan Project work at Columbia's SAM Laboratories 1942
• The nuclear shell model discovery
  Explained the 'magic numbers' of nuclear stability; shared the 1963 Nobel Prize 1950

• June 28, 1906 aged 0 Born in Kattowitz, Germany
• 1930 aged ~24 Earns her physics PhD at Göttingen and marries Joseph Mayer
• December 1941 aged 35 Takes her first paid position, teaching part time at Sarah Lawrence College
• 1942 aged ~36 Joins Manhattan Project uranium-separation research at Columbia
• 1946 aged ~40 Becomes an unpaid voluntary professor at the University of Chicago and Argonne
• 1950 aged ~44 Publishes the nuclear shell model explaining 'magic numbers' of stability
• 1960 aged ~54 Named full professor of physics at UC San Diego
• 1963 aged ~57 Shares the Nobel Prize in Physics with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Wigner
• February 20, 1972 aged 65 Dies in San Diego, California

• Enrico Fermi 1901–1954
  Italian-American physicist who built the first nuclear reactor and won the Nobel Prize in Physics. collaborator
• Edward Teller 1908–2003
  Physicist and advocate of the hydrogen bomb whose work and policy influence shaped Cold War science and defense. colleague at Los Alamos
• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. Manhattan Project colleague
• Chien-Shiung Wu 1912–1997
  Experimental physicist whose decisive work on parity violation transformed particle physics and challenged assumptions about natural symmetry. contemporary