MARIA GOEPPERT MAYER
Early Years
Maria Goeppert was born on June 28, 1906, in Kattowitz, Upper Silesia
(then in Germany), the only child of Friedrich Goeppert and his wife, Maria,
nee Wolff. In 1910 the family moved to Goettingen, where Friedrich Goeppert
became Professor of Pediatrics. Maria spent most of her life there until
marriage.
On January 19, 1930, she married Joseph E. Mayer, a chemist (elected to the
National Academy of Sciences in 1946), and they had two children: Maria
Ann, now Maria Mayer Wentzel, and Peter Conrad. Maria Goeppert Mayer
became a citizen of the United States in 1933. She died on February 20, 1972.
Both her father's academic status and his location (Goettingen) had a
profound influence on her life and career. She was especially proud of being the
seventh straight generation of university professors on her father's side. Her
father's personal influence on her was great. She is quoted as having said that
her father was more interesting than her mother, "He was after all a scientist."
* She was said to have been told by her father that she should not grow up to be
a woman, meaning a housewife, and therefore decided, "I wasn't going to be
just a woman." +
The move to Goettingen came to dominate the whole structure of her
education, as might be expected. Georgia Augusta University, better known
simply as "Goettingen," was at the height of its prestige, especially in the fields
of mathematics and physics during the period when she was growing up. She
was surrounded by the great names of mathematics and physics. David Hilbert
was an immediate neighbor and friend of the family. Max Born came to
Goettingen in 1921 and James Franck followed soon after; both were close
friends of the Goeppert family. Richard Courant, Hermann Weyl, Gustav
Herglotz, and Edmund Landau were professors of mathematics.
The presence of these giants of mathematics and physics naturally attracted
the most promising young scholars to the institution. Through the years, Maria
Goeppert came to meet and know Arthur Holly Compton, Max Delbrueck, Paul
A. M. Dirac, Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, John von Neumann, J. Robert
Oppenheimer, Wolfgang Pauli, Linus Pauling, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and
Victor Weisskopf. It was the opportunity to work with James Franck that led to
Joseph Mayer's coming to Goettingen and gave him the chance to meet and
marry her.
* Joan Dash, A Life of One's Own (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 231.
+ Ibid.
Maria Goeppert was attracted to mathematics very early and planned to
prepare for the University, but there was no public institution in Goettingen
serving to prepare girls for this purpose. Therefore, in 1921 she left the public
elementary school to enter the Frauenstudium, a small private school run by
suffragettes to prepare those few girls who wanted to seek admission to the
University for the required examination. The school closed its doors before the
full three-year program was completed, but she decided to take the University
entrance examination promptly in spite of her truncated formal preparation.
She passed the examination and was admitted to the University in the spring of
1924 as a student of mathematics. Except for one term spent at Cambridge
University, England, her entire career as a university student was completed at
Goettingen.
In 1924 she was invited by Max Born to join his physics seminar, with the
result that her interests started to shift from mathematics to physics. It was just
at this time that the great developments in quantum mechanics were taking
place, with Goettingen as one of the principal centers; in fact, Goettingen might
have been described as a "cauldron of quantum mechanics" at that time; and in
that environment Maria Goeppert was molded as a physicist.
As a student of Max Born, a theoretical physicist with a strong foundation in
mathematics, she was well trained in the mathematical concepts required to
understand quantum mechanics. This and her mathematics education gave her
early style of research a strong mathematical flavor. Yet the influence of James
Franck's nonmathematical approach to physics certainly became apparent later.
In fact, a reading of her thesis reveals that Franck already had an influence at
that stage of her work.
She completed her thesis and received her doctorate in 1930. The thesis was
devoted to the theoretical treatment of double photon processes. It was
described many years by Wigner as a ""masterplece of clarity and concreteness.
Although at the time it was written the possibility of comparing its theoretical
results with those of an experiment seemed remote, if not impossible, double
photon phenomena became a matter of considerable experimental interest many
years later, both nuclear physics and in astrophysics. Now, as the result of the
development of lasers and nonlinear optics, these phenomena are of even
greater experimental interest.
After receiving her degree, she married and moved to Baltimore, Maryland,
where her husband, Joseph Mayer, took up an appointment in the Chemistry
Department of Johns Hopkins University. Opportunities for her to obtain a
normal professional appointment at that time, which was at the height of the
Depression, were extremely limited. Nepotism rules were particularly stringent
then and prevented her from being considered for a regular appointment at
Hopkins; nevertheless, members of the Physics Department were able to
arrange for a very modest assistantship, which gave her access to the University
facilities, provided her with a place to work in the Physics Building, and
encouraged her to participate in the scientific activities of the University. In the
later years of this appointment, she also had the opportunity to present some
lecture courses for graduate students.
At the time, the attitude in the Physics Department toward theoretical
physics gave it little weight as compared to experimental research; however, the
department included one outstanding theorist, Karl Herzfeld, who carried the
burden of teaching all of the theoretical graduate courses. Herzfeld was an
expert in classical theory, especially kinetic theory and thermodynamics, and he
had a particular interest in what has come to be known as chemical physics.
This was also Joseph Mayer's primary field of interest, and under his and
Herzfeld's guidance and influence Maria Mayer became actively involved in
this field, thereby deepening and broadening her knowledge of physics.
However, she did not limit herself to this one field but took advantage of the
various talents existing in the Johns Hopkins department, even going so far as
to spend a brief period working with R. W. Wood, the dean of the Johns
Hopkins experimentalists. Another member of the department with whom she
had a substantial common interest was Gerhard Dieke. The Mathematics
Department, which was quite active at that time, included Francis Murnaghan
and Aurel Wintner, with whom she developed particularly close connections.
However, the two members of the Johns Hopkins faculty who had the greatest
influence were her husband and Herzfeld. Not only did she write a number of
papers with Herzfeld in her early years there, but also they became close,
lifelong friends.
The rapid development of quantum mechanics was having a profound effect in
the field of chemical physics in which she had become involved, and the
resulting richness and breadth of theoretical chemical physics was so great as to
appear to have no bounds. She was in a particularly good position to take
advantage of this situation, since no one at Johns Hopkins had a background in
quantum mechanics comparable to hers. In particular, she became involved in
pioneering work on the structure of organic compounds with a student of
Herzfeld's, Alfred Sklar; and in that work she applied her special mathematical
background, using the methods of group theory and matrix mechanics.
During the early years in Baltimore, she spent the summers of 1931, 1932,
and 1933 back in Goettingen, where she worked with her former teacher, Max
Born. In the first of those summers she completed with him their article in the
Handbuch der Physik, "Dynamische Gittertheorie der Kristalle." In 1935 she
published her important paper on double beta-decay, representing a direct
application of techniques she had used for her thesis, but in an entirely different
context.
Later, James Franck joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins and renewed his
close personal relationship with the Mayers. Also in that later period, Edward
Teller became a member of the faculty of George Washington University, in
nearby Washington, D.C., and she looked to him for guidance in the
developing frontiers of theoretical physics. At about the same time, she became
deeply involved in a collaboration with Joseph Mayer in writing the book
Statistical Mechanics, published in 1940.
When as her first bona fide student I turned to her for guidance in choosing a
research problem, nuclear physics was on the rise; and she told me that that
was the only field worth consideration by a beginning theorist. She took me to
Teller to ask his advice about possible research problems. Our resulting joint
work was her first publication in the field of nuclear physics. My thesis problem
on nuclear magnetic moments was also selected with Teller's help, and she
gave her guidance throughout that work, suggesting application to this problem
in nuclear physics of techniques of quantum mechanics in which she was so
proficient. These two forays into the field were her only activities in the physics
of nuclear structure until after World War II.
Her approach to quantum mechanics, having been so greatly influenced by
Born, gave preference to matrix mechanics over Schroedinger wave mechanics.
She was very quick with matrix manipulations and the use of symmetry
arguments to obtain answers to a specific problem, and this ability stood her in
good stead in her later work on nuclear shell structure, which led to her Nobel
Prize. She appeared to think of physical theories, in general, and quantum
mechanics, in particular, as tools for solving physics problems and was not
much concerned with the philosophical aspects or the structure of the theory.
When she had the opportunity to teach graduate courses, her lectures were well
organized, very technical, and highly condensed. She spent little time on
background matters or physical interpretation. Her facility with the methods of
theoretical physics was overwhelming to most of the graduate students, in
whom she inspired a considerable amount of awe. At the same time, the
students took a rather romantic view of this young scientific couple, known as
"Joe and Maria," and felt that it was a great loss when they left Johns Hopkins
to go to Columbia University in 1939.