February 20, 1972 – Death of Maria Goeppert Mayer, 2nd Woman to Earn Nobel Prize in Physics

Maria Goeppert Mayer was born on June 28, 1906 in Kattowitz (now Katowice, Poland), a Silesian city in Prussia. Becoming a theoretical physicist, it was she who proposed the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. She was the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, the first being Marie Curie. In 1986, the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award for early-career women physicists was established in her honor.

Maria Goeppert Mayer Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library

Maria took the university entrance examination at age 17, a year early, and in 1924, entered the University of Göttingen, where she studied mathematics. An Argonne National Library website dedicated to her reports that she changed her major to physics after attending a seminar on the newly emerging field of quantum physics, taught by famed physicist Max Born. The physics faculty included several luminaries, such as James Franck and Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus. In 1930, when Maria defended her doctoral dissertation—on double photon reactions—Franck, Windaus, and Born served on the committee. (All four scientists would receive a Nobel Prize.)

Eugene Wigner (who later shared the Nobel Prize in physics with her) later described her thesis as “a masterpiece of clarity and concreteness”. Technological developments enabled the theory outlined in her thesis to be verified in 1961.

In 1930 Maria married Joseph Mayer, an American Rockefeller fellow studying in Germany, and the couple moved to the US, where Mayer had been offered a position as associate professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins University.

Maria Goeppert Mayer

For three decades, Goeppert Mayer followed her husband around in his career, first at Johns Hopkins University, then Columbia University, then the University of Chicago. At each university, she worked as a “fellow” or “research associate” or “volunteer associate professor.” But because of anti-nepotism rules, none of these universities gave her a salary or a full-time position.

As the Nobel Prize website recounts, “the urgency of World War II prompted the US government to treat Goeppert Mayer’s expertise with more respect than its major universities did.” While she was still “volunteering” at Columbia when the university was conducting top-secret research to enrich uranium for an atomic bomb, the US government paid her for bomb research.

After the war, while at yet another unpaid position at the University of Chicago, Goeppert Mayer received an offer of part-time work at Argonne National Laboratory, a centre for nuclear physics. “But I don’t know anything about nuclear physics,” she remembers protesting. That lack of background was no deterrent.

Maria Goeppert Mayer with colleagues outside of the physics building of Argonne National Laboratory, ca. 1946 Argonne National Laboratory

In 1949, working at the University of Chicago and inspired by a question from Enrico Fermi, she proposed that inside the nucleus, protons and neutrons are arranged in a series of nucleon layers, like the layers of an onion, with neutrons and protons rotating around their axes (spinning) and the centre of the nucleus (orbiting) at each level.

For this mathematical model for the structure of nuclear shells, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963, which she shared with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Wigner. In 1960, she was appointed full professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, more than a decade after discovering the nuclear shell model, and 30 years after beginning her career as a scientist.

Maria Goeppert Mayer among fellow members of the University of Chicago Research Institutes at a New Years’ Eve party ca. 1960 Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library

Goeppert Mayer died in San Diego, California, on February 20, 1972, after a heart attack that had struck her the previous year left her comatose. She was buried at El Camino Memorial Park in San Diego.

After her death, the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award was created by the American Physical Society (APS) to honor young female physicists at the beginning of their careers.