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Portrait of Maria Goeppert Mayer

Science · Physics

Maria Goeppert Mayer

1906–1972 · German-American

Nuclear physics; theoretical physics

Maria Goeppert Mayer was a German-born American physicist who explained the nuclear shell model, showing why nuclei with certain "magic numbers" of protons or neutrons are especially stable. She shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Wigner, becoming only the second woman after Marie Curie to win the physics prize. For much of her career she worked in unpaid or voluntary posts because of rules against employing academics' wives.

How to spot them

  • ▸Nuclear shell model and the 'magic numbers' (2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, 126)
  • ▸Second woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics (1963), after Marie Curie
  • ▸Doctoral thesis at Göttingen under Max Born predicting two-photon absorption
  • ▸Worked for years without pay at Johns Hopkins and Chicago alongside her chemist husband Joseph Mayer

Key discoveries & works

Nuclear shell model with spin-orbit coupling (1949–50)

Explained the magic numbers; developed independently by Hans Jensen's group in Germany

Prediction of two-photon absorption (1931)

Doctoral work; the unit of two-photon absorption cross-section (GM) is named after her

Statistical Mechanics (with Joseph Mayer) (1940)

Textbook co-written with her husband

Elementary Theory of Nuclear Shell Structure (with J. Hans D. Jensen) (1955)

Book-length account of the shell model

Key ideas

  • Protons and neutrons fill nuclear shells rather like electrons in atoms; filled shells give extra stability
  • Magic numbers of nucleons are 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82 and 126

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Kattowitz, Germany (now Katowice, Poland), in 1906; died in San Diego in 1972
  • •Nobel Prize in Physics 1963 'for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure', shared with J. Hans D. Jensen; the other half went to Eugene Wigner
  • •Took her PhD at Göttingen in 1930, supervised by Max Born
  • •Worked on isotope separation for the Manhattan Project at Columbia University
  • •Got her first full-time paid professorship at the University of California, San Diego, in 1960
  • •A San Diego newspaper reported her Nobel under the headline 'S.D. Mother Wins Nobel Prize'

Drill it — 6 cards

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Sources