Maria Goeppert Mayer (1906-1972)

Nobelist Maria Goeppert Mayer, shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in
physics for her research on the shell model of the atomic nucleus.
Maria was born on June 28th, 1906, in Kattowitz, Upper Silesia, then
Germany, the only child of Friedrich Goeppart and his wife maria, nee Wolff.
On her father's side, she is the seventh straight generation of university
professors.

In 1910 her father went as a professor of Pediatrics to Gottingen where she spent most of her life until marriage. She went to private and public schools in Gottingen and had the great privilege to have very good teachers. It was somehow never discussed, but taken for granted by her parents as well as herself that she would go to the University. Yet, at the time it was not exceptionally easy for a woman to do so. In Gottingen there was only a privately endowed school which prepared girls for the entrance examination for the university. The school closed it's doors during the time of the inflation, but the teachers continued to give instructions to the pupils. Maria Goeppert finally took the abitur examination in Hannover, in 1924, being examined by teachers she had never seen in her life. In the spring of 1924 she enrolled at the University of Gottingen, with the intention of becoming a mathematician. But she soon found herself becoming mor and more attracted to physics. This was the time when quantum mechanics was young and exciting. Except for one term which she spent in Cambridge, England, where her greatest profit was to learn English, her entire university career took place in Gottingen.

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She is deeply thankful to Max Born, for his kind guidance of her scientific education. In 1930 she took her doctorate in theoretical physics. There were three Nobel Prize winners on the doctoral committee, Born, Franck, and Windaus. Shortly before, she had met Joseph Edward Mayer, an American Rockefeller fellow working with James Franck. In 1930 she went with him to the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. This was the time of the depression, and no university would think of employing the wife of a professor. But she kept working, doing odd jobs for the professors such as typing letters, and helping the teachers with the problems of physics, just for the fun of doing something that involved physics.

Karl F. Herzfeld took an interest in her work, and under his influence and
that of her husband, she slowly developed into a chemical physicist. She
wrote various papers with the Herzfeld and with her husband, and she started
to work on the colour of organic molecules.

In 1939 they went to Columbia. Dr. Goeppert Mayer taught one year at Sarah Lawrence College, but she worked mainly at the S.A.M. Laboratory, on the separation of isotopes of uranium, with Harold Urey as director. Urey usually assigned her not to the main line of research of the laboratory, but to side issues, for instance, to the investigation of the possibility of separating isotopes by photochemical reactions. This was nice, clean physics although it did not help in the separation of isotopes.

In 1946 they went to Chicago. This was the first place where she was not
considered a nuisance, but greeted with open arms. She was suddenly a
Professor in the Physics department and in the Institute for Nuclear
Studies. She was employed by the Argonne National Laboratory with very
little knowledge of nuclear physics. It took her some time to find her way
in this, for her, new field. But in the atmosphere of Chicago, it was rather
easy to learn nuclear physics. She owes a great deal to the very many
discussions with Edward Teller, and in particular with Enrico Fermi, who was
always patient and helpful.

In 1948 she started to work on nuclear shell structure and the meaning of the "magic numbers (see last page)". She postulated these numbers to be the shell numbers of a shell model, a "nuclear counterpart to the closed shells of electrons" at the atomic level. She saw the nucleus as being like an onion with the protons and neutrons revolving around each other in layers. This shell was not original with her, but when she described the pattern of the circling protons and neutrons as "spin-orbiting" one pair going clockwise, the other going counter clockwise, she broke new ground. She saw the role her seven "magic numbers" played. They represented the most abundant elements because in these elements the nuclear particles were very tightly bound together, going in a clockwise-counter clockwise, clockwise-counter clockwise pattern

These tightly fitting nuclei would not change properties with any other elements and that was why these certain
elements such as tin and lead were so abundant. It took her a year to find
this explanation, and several years to work out most of the consequences.
The fact that Haxel, Jensen and Suess, whom she had never met, gave the same
explanation at the same time helped to convince her that it was right. She
met Jensen in 1950. A few years later the competitors from both sides of the
Atlantic decided to write a book together called the Elementary Theory of
Nuclear Shell Structure, published in 1955.

In 1960 they came to La Jolla where Maria Goeppert Mayer was a professor of physics. She was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a corresponding member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Heidelberg. She has received honorary degrees of Doctor of science from Russel Sage College, Mount Holyoke College and Smith College. When Maria Goeppert Mayer won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1963 she became only the second US woman ever to a Nobel Prize, and the first US woman to do so in physics. Her work promoted the theory that the stability of the atomic nuclei is due to the arrangement of the protons and the neutrons in relatively fixed shells or orbits. She publically encouraged young woman to pursue careers in the sciences. After having two children both born in Baltimore, Maria Goeppert Mayer died in San Diego on February 20th, 1972, after a protracted illness.

** Magic Numbers:
In physics, in the shell models of both atomic and nuclear structure, any
of a series of numbers that can connote stable structure. They designate the
sum of electrons in atoms or the sum of either protons or neutrons in nuclei
that occupy completely filled, or closed, shells.
The magic numbers for atoms are 2, 10, 18, 36, 54, and 86, corresponding to
the total numbers of electrons in filled electron shells.**