NATIONAL   ACADEMY   OF   SCIENCES
 
MARIA GOEPPERT MAYER 
 
1906-1972
 

A Biographical Memoir by
ROBERT G. SACHS 
 
 REPRINTED FROM Biographical Memoirs VOLUME 50 
 PUBLISHED 1979 BY THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
   
 OF  THE  UNITED STATES, WASHINGTON, D.C.
                                                                                
This biography was originally written by Robert G. Sachs for the 
Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences 
and appeared in Volume 50 of the series. 
It is reproduced here, for the World Wide Web, with the permission of the 
National Academy of  Sciences and Robert G. Sachs 
  
 Steven A. Moszkowski, December 18, 1996 
 
MARIA GOEPPERT MAYER 
June 28,1906-February 20,1972 
BY ROBERT G. SACHS  

 WHEN IN 1963 she received the Nobel Prize in Physics,Maria 
Goeppert Mayer was the second woman in history to win that prize—the first 
being Marie Curie, who had received it sixty years earlier—and she was the 
third woman in history to receive the Nobel Prize in a science category. This 
accomplishment had its beginnings in her early exposure to an intense 
atmosphere of science, both at home and in the surrounding university 
community, a community providing her with the opportunity to follow her 
inclinations and to develop her remarkable talents under the guidance of the 
great teachers and scholars of mathematics and physics. Throughout her full 
and gracious life, her science continued to be the theme about which her 
activities were centered, and it culminated in her major contribution to the 
understanding of the structure of the atomic nucleus, the spin-orbit coupling 
shell model of nuclei. 
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