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Maria Goeppert Mayer (German pronunciation: [maˈʁiːa ˈɡœpɛʁt ˈmaɪ̯ɐ] ⓘ, née Göppert; June 28, 1906 – February 20, 1972) was a German-born American theoretical physicist, and Nobel laureate in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus.
Biographical. Maria Goeppert Mayer was born on June 28, 1906, in Kattowitz, Upper Silesia, then Germany, the only child of Friedrich Goeppert and his wife Maria, nee Wolff. On her father’s side, she is the seventh straight generation of university professors.
Maria Goeppert Mayer (born June 28, 1906, Kattowitz, Ger. [now Katowice, Pol.]—died Feb. 20, 1972, San Diego, Calif., U.S.) was a German-born American physicist who shared one-half of the 1963 Nobel Prize for Physics with J. Hans D. Jensen of West Germany for their proposal of the shell nuclear model.
Sep 26, 2017 · Maria Goeppert Mayer, the last woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physics, claimed that honor in 1963. Since then many other women have been widely considered worthy, too: Vera...
For most of her career, Maria Goeppert Mayer worked “just for the fun of doing physics,” without pay or status or a tenured position. She was 58 before she became a full professor. And yet she made major contributions to the growing understanding of nuclear physics, including the revelatory nuclear shell model.
Life. Maria Goeppert-Mayer was born in Katowittz, which was then part of Germany. Her father became a professor at the university in Göttingen, from which Goeppert-Mayer also received her PhD in 1930.
Maria Goeppert Mayer was at the time the only living woman in the world with a Nobel Prize in science, and she and Marie Curie were the only women to have won a Nobel in physics. Only shortly before, in 1959, she had finally been appointed to a position as a full professor of physics at the new campus of the University of California at San Diego.
