Maria Goeppert Mayer

Born on 28 June 1906 in Kattowitz, Germany (now Katowice, Poland), Maria Goeppert Mayer was a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who developed a model to explain the packing of protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus. She is the last woman to receive the physics prize, and one of two to ever receive it (Marie Curie is the other). She studied under multiple Nobel laureates, including Max Born, at the University of Göttingen in Germany and in 1930 earned a doctorate in theoretical physics. She moved to Johns Hopkins University as a volunteer associate and then to Columbia University, where she worked on separating uranium-235 from natural uranium as part of efforts toward an atomic bomb. In 1946 Mayer moved to Chicago and started working at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. Her research focused on the question of why some atomic nuclei are stable while others are not. In 1948 she came up with an explanation: the nuclear shell model , in which protons and neutrons fill a series of shells of increasing energy, similar to the orbitals of electrons surrounding the nucleus. Nuclei with 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, or 126 total protons and neutrons (these are called magic numbers) are the most stable. Mayer’s work, published in Physical Review, appeared one issue after a paper by Hans Jensen and colleagues that contained the same insight. Rather than become fierce competitors, Mayer and Jensen teamed up on research and cowrote a book on nuclear shell structure. Mayer, Jensen, and Eugene Wigner shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics. Despite her accomplishments , Mayer did not receive a full-time faculty appointment until 1960, at the University of California at San Diego. She suffered a stroke shortly afterward but kept teaching and working on the shell model until her death in 1972 at age 65. Wigner wrote an obituary for Mayer in Physics Today. (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, W. F. Meggers Gallery of Nobel Laureates Collection)

Date in History: 28 June 1906