MARIA GOEPPERT MAYER
A SHORT BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

 
 Maria Goeppert was born in Silesia in 1906. Her father was an academic and 
moved to Goettingen. There she got her education. The 1920's were an extremely
exciting time for Theoretical Physics, and Goettingen was, perhaps, the most 
active place in developing the ideas of modern quantum mechanics and 
applying them to atoms. Maria wrote her Ph.D thesis on the decay of 
excited states by the simultaneous emission of two quanta. It was in Goettingen
that Maria met Joe Mayer, a theoretical chemist from the United States on a 
fellowship. They were married shortly, and came to the United States. 
For a time, they worked at Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore, and 
wrote a textbook on Statistical Mechanics, which became widely used.
During World War II, she worked on the Manhattan Project. After the
war she joined Joe at the University of Chicago. It was there that she
made her famous discoveries concerning the Nuclear Shell Model. 
Her contribution to the Nuclear Shell Model can be roughly divided
 into three parts:  
1. Discovery of the Magic Numbers
For more on the discovery of magic numbers in nuclei 
2. Explanation of the Magic Numbers (Independently done by Jensen). 
This is what Mayer and Jensen shared the Nobel prize for, in 1963.
 For more on explanation of the magic numbers 
3. Pairing 
 For more on nuclear pairing 
She won the Nobel Prize (shared with Hans Jensen) in 1963.
From 1961 on, she and Joe were Professors at the University of 
California in La Jolla. She died in 1972.  

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