Maria Goeppert Mayer

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Lore & Background

Maria Göppert was born on June 28, 1906, in Kattowitz, Germany, the only child of pediatrician Friedrich Göppert and Maria Wolff. In 1910, she moved with her family to Göttingen, where her father was appointed Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Göttingen. She took the Abitur at age 17, a year early. In the spring of 1924, she entered the University of Göttingen to study mathematics, then switched to physics. Her 1931 doctoral thesis worked out the theory of possible two-photon absorption by atoms; Eugene Wigner later called it "a masterpiece of clarity and concreteness." Her examiners were three Nobel Prize winners: Max Born, James Franck, and Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus. The development of the laser in the 1960s permitted experimental verification, and today the unit for the two-photon absorption cross section is called the Goeppert Mayer (GM) unit. On January 19, 1930, she married American chemist Joseph Edward Mayer and moved to the United States. Strict rules against nepotism prevented Johns Hopkins University from hiring her as a faculty member, but she was given a job as an assistant and published a landmark paper on double beta decay in 1935. In 1937, she moved to Columbia University, where she took an unpaid position. During World War II, she worked for the Manhattan Project at Columbia on isotope separation, and with Edward Teller at the Los Alamos Laboratory on the development of thermonuclear weapons. After the war, Goeppert Mayer became a voluntary Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago and a senior physicist at the university-run Argonne National Laboratory. She developed a mathematical model for the structure of nuclear shells, which she published in 1950, explaining why certain numbers of nucleons—what Eugene Wigner called magic numbers: 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, and 126—result in particularly stable configurations. For this she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963. In 1960, she was appointed Full Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego.

Reader's Guide

Maria Goeppert Mayer's significance lies in her foundational contributions to nuclear physics, particularly the nuclear shell model, which explained the stability of certain atomic nuclei. Her work earned her the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics, making her only the second woman to receive that honor. Earlier, her doctoral thesis on two-photon absorption proved prescient, as the development of lasers later confirmed her theory; the unit for two-photon absorption cross-section is named the Goeppert Mayer (GM) unit in her honor. Despite facing institutional barriers due to nepotism rules that limited her academic appointments, she persisted in research, contributing to the Manhattan Project and later to nuclear theory. Her legacy includes the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award, established in 1986 to support early-career women physicists.

Did You Know?

• She was the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, after Marie Curie in 1903.
• The unit for the two-photon absorption cross section is called the Goeppert Mayer (GM) unit.
• Her doctoral examiners were three Nobel Prize winners: Max Born, James Franck, and Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus.
• She programmed the Aberdeen Proving Ground's ENIAC to solve criticality problems using the Monte Carlo method.
• She derived the Bigeleisen-Mayer equation with Jacob Bigeleisen while at the University of Chicago.