Maria Goeppert Mayer

Born June 28, 1906

Kattowitz, German Empire
(today Katowice, Poland)
Died February 20, 1972 (aged 65)
San Diego, California, United
States
Citizenship Germany
United States
Fields Physics
Institutions Sarah Lawrence College
Columbia University
Los Alamos Laboratory
Argonne National Laboratory
University of California, San
Diego
Alma mater University of Gttingen
Doctoral
advisor
Max Born
Known for Nuclear Shell Structure
Notable
awards
Nobel Prize for Physics (1963)
Signature
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Maria Goeppert Mayer (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. She was the second female
Nobel laureate in physics, after Marie Curie.
A graduate of the University of Gttingen, Goeppert Mayer
wrote her doctorate on the theory of possible two-photon
absorption by atoms. At the time, the chances of
experimentally verifying her thesis seemed remote, but the
development of the laser permitted this. Today, the unit for
the two-photon absorption cross section is named the
Goeppert Mayer (GM) unit.
Goeppert Mayer married Joseph Edward Mayer, and moved
to the United States, where he was an associate professor at
Johns Hopkins University. Strict rules against nepotism
prevented Johns Hopkins University from taking her on as a
faculty member, but she was given a job as an assistant and
published a landmark paper on double beta decay in 1935. In
1937, she moved to Columbia University, where she took an
unpaid position. During World War II, she worked for the
Manhattan Project at Columbia on isotope separation, and
with Edward Teller at the Los Alamos Laboratory on the
development of the Teller's "Super" bomb.
After the war, Goeppert Mayer became a voluntary associate
professor of Physics at the University of Chicago (where
Teller and her husband worked) and a senior physicist at the
nearby Argonne National Laboratory. She developed a
mathematical model for the structure of nuclear shells, for
which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963,
which she shared with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Wigner.
In 1960, she was appointed full professor of physics at the
University of California at San Diego.
1 Early life
2 United States
3 Manhattan Project
4 Nuclear shell model
Maria Goeppert-Mayer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Goeppert-Mayer
1 of 8 6/21/2014 9:47 PM
5 Death and legacy
6 See also
7 Notes
8 References
9 Further reading
10 External links
Maria Goeppert was born on June 28, 1906, in Kattowitz, a city in Prussia, the only child of Friedrich Goeppert
and his wife Maria ne Wolff.
[1]
In 1910, she moved with her family to Gttingen when her father,
[2]
a sixth-
generation university professor,
[3]
was appointed as the professor of pediatrics at the University of Gttingen.
[1]
Goeppert was closer to her father than her mother. "Well, my father was more interesting," she later explained.
"He was after all a scientist."
[4]
Goeppert was educated at the Hhere Technische in Gttingen, a school for middle-class girls who aspired to
higher education.
[5]
In 1921, she entered the Frauenstudium, a private high school run by suffragettes that
aimed to prepare girls for university. She took the abitur, the university entrance examination, at age 17, a year
early, with three or four girls from her school and thirty boys. All the girls passed, but only one of the boys
did.
[6]
In the Spring of 1924, Goeppert entered the University of Gttingen, where she studied mathematics.
[7]
A
purported shortage of women mathematics teachers for schools for girls led to an upsurge of women studying
mathematics at a time of high unemployment, and there was even a female professor of mathematics at
Gttingen, Emmy Noether, but most were only interested in qualifying for their teaching certificate.
[8]
Instead, Goeppert became interested in physics, and chose to pursue a Ph.D. In her 1930 doctoral thesis
[9]
she
worked out the theory of possible two-photon absorption by atoms.
[7]
Eugene Wigner later described the thesis
as "a masterpiece of clarity and concreteness".
[10]
At the time, the chances of experimentally verifying her
thesis seemed remote, but the development of the laser permitted the first experimental verification in 1961
when two-photon-excited fluorescence was detected in a europium-doped crystal.
[11]
To honor her fundamental
contribution to this area, the unit for the two-photon absorption cross section is named the Goeppert Mayer
(GM) unit. One GM is 10
50
cm
4
s photon
1
.
[12]
Her examiners were three future Nobel prize winners: Max
Born, James Franck and Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus.
[13]
On January 19, 1930, Goeppert married Joseph Edward Mayer, one of James Franck's assistants.
[14]
The two
had met when Mayer had boarded with the Goepprt family.
[15]
The couple moved to Mayer's home country of
the United States, where he had been offered a position as associate professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins
University.
[16]
They had two children, Maria Ann and Peter Conrad.
[14]
Maria Goeppert-Mayer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Goeppert-Mayer
2 of 8 6/21/2014 9:47 PM
Strict rules against nepotism prevented Johns Hopkins University from hiring Goeppert Mayer as a faculty
member,
[17]
but she was given a job as an assistant in the Physics Department working with German
correspondence. She received a very small salary, a place to work and access to the facilities. She taught some
courses,
[14][18]
and published an important paper on double beta decay in 1935.
[19]
There was little interest in quantum mechanics at Johns Hopkins,
but Goeppert Mayer worked with Karl Herzfeld, collaborating on a
number of papers. She also returned to Gttingen in the summers of
1931, 1932 and 1933 to work with her former examiner Born,
writing an article with him for the Handbuch der Physik. This
ended when the NSDAP came to power in 1933, and many
academics, including Born and Franck, lost their jobs. Goeppert
Mayer and Herzfeld became involved in refugee relief efforts.
[14][18]
Joe Mayer was fired in 1937. He attributed this to the hatred of
women on the part of the dean of physical sciences, which he
thought was provoked by Goeppert Mayer's presence in the
laboratory.
[21]
Herzfeld agreed and added that, with Goeppert
Mayer, Franck and Herzfeld all at Johns Hopkins, some thought
that there were too many German scientists there. There were also complaints from some students that Mayer's
chemistry lectures contained too much modern physics.
[22]
Mayer took up a position at Columbia University,
where the chairman of the Physics Department, George Pegram, arranged for Goeppert Mayer to have an office,
but she received no salary. She soon made good friends with Harold Urey and Enrico Fermi, who arrived at
Columbia in 1939. Fermi asked her to investigate the valence shell of the undiscovered transuranic elements.
Using the ThomasFermi model, she predicted that they would form a new series similar to the rare earth
elements. This proved to be correct.
[23]
In December 1941, Goeppert Mayer took up her first paid professional position, teaching science part-time at
Sarah Lawrence College. In the spring of 1942, with the United States embroiled in World War II, she joined the
Manhattan Project. She accepted a part-time research post from Urey with Columbia University's Substitute
Alloy Materials (SAM) Laboratory. The objective of this project was to find a means of separating the fissile
uranium-235 isotope in natural uranium; she researched the chemical and thermodynamic properties of uranium
hexafluoride and investigated the possibility of separating isotopes by photochemical reactions. This method
proved impractical at the time, but the development of lasers would later open the possibility of separation of
isotopes by laser excitation.
[24]
Through her friend Edward Teller, Goeppert Mayer was given a position at Columbia with the Opacity Project,
which researched the properties of matter and radiation at extremely high temperatures with an eye to the
development of the Teller's "Super" bomb, the wartime program for the development of thermonuclear
weapons.
[24]
In February 1945, Joe was sent to the Pacific War, and Goeppert Mayer decided to leave her
children in New York and join Teller's group at the Los Alamos Laboratory. Joe came back from the Pacific
earlier than expected, and they returned to New York together in July 1945.
[24][25]
In February 1946, Joe became a professor in the Chemistry Department and the new Institute for Nuclear
Some [schools] even condescended to give
her work, though they refused to pay her,
and the topics were typically 'feminine',
such as figuring out what causes colors ...
the University of Chicago finally took her
seriously enough to make her a professor of
physics. Although she got her own office,
the department still didn't pay her ... When
the Swedish academy announced in 1963
that she had won her profession's highest
honor, the San Diego newspaper greeted her
big day with the headline "S.D. Mother
Wins Nobel Prize".
[20]
Maria Goeppert-Mayer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Goeppert-Mayer
3 of 8 6/21/2014 9:47 PM
Maria Goeppert Mayer walking into
the Nobel ceremony with King
Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden in 1963
Studies at the University of Chicago, and Goeppert Mayer was able to become a voluntary associate professor
of Physics at the school. When Teller also accepted a position there, she was able to continue her Opacity work
with him. When the nearby Argonne National Laboratory was founded on July 1, 1946, Goeppert Mayer was
also offered a part-time job there as a senior physicist in the Theoretical Physics Division. She responded "I
don't know anything about nuclear physics."
[26]
She programmed the Aberdeen Proving Ground's ENIAC to
solved criticality problems for a liquid metal cooled reactor using the Monte Carlo method.
[27]
During her time at Chicago and Argonne in the late 1940s, Goeppert
Mayer developed a mathematical model for the structure of nuclear
shells, which she published in 1950.
[28][29]
Her model explained why
certain numbers of nucleons in an atomic nucleus result in particularly
stable configurations. These numbers are what Eugene Wigner called
magic numbers: 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, and 126. Enrico Fermi provided a
critical insight by asking her: "Is there any indication of spin orbit
coupling?"
[30]
She realised that this was indeed the case, and postulated
that the nucleus is a series of closed shells and pairs of neutrons and
protons tend to couple together.
[31][32]
She described the idea as follows:
Think of a room full of waltzers. Suppose they go round the room
in circles, each circle enclosed within another. Then imagine that
in each circle, you can fit twice as many dancers by having one
pair go clockwise and another pair go counterclockwise. Then add
one more variation; all the dancers are spinning twirling round and
round like tops as they circle the room, each pair both twirling and
circling. But only some of those that go counterclockwise are
twirling counterclockwise. The others are twirling clockwise
while circling counterclockwise. The same is true of those that are
dancing around clockwise: some twirl clockwise, others twirl
counterclockwise.
[33]
Three German scientists, Otto Haxel, J. Hans D. Jensen, and Hans Suess, were also working on solving the
same problem, and arrived at the same conclusion independently. Their results were announced in the issue of
the Physical Review before Goeppert Mayer 's announcement in June 1949.
[34][35]
Afterwards, she collaborated
with them. Hans Jensen co-authored a book with Goeppert Mayer in 1950 titled Elementary Theory of Nuclear
Shell Structure.
[36]
In 1963, Goeppert Mayer, Jensen, and Wigner shared the Nobel Prize for Physics "for their
discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure."
[37]
She was the second female Nobel laureate in physics, after
Marie Curie.
[38]
In 1960, Goeppert Mayer was appointed full professor of physics at the University of California at San Diego.
Although she suffered from a stroke shortly after arriving there, she continued to teach and conduct research for
a number of years.
[39][40]
Goeppert Mayer died in San Diego, California, on February 20, 1972, after a heart
attack that had struck her the previous year left her comatose. She was buried at El Camino Memorial Park in
Maria Goeppert-Mayer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Goeppert-Mayer
4 of 8 6/21/2014 9:47 PM
San Diego.
[32]
After her death, the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award was created by the American Physical Society to honor
young female physicists at the beginning of their careers. Open to all female physicists who hold Ph.D.s, the
winner receives money and the opportunity to give guest lectures about her research at four major
institutions.
[41]
Two of her former universities also honor her. The Argonne National Laboratory presents an
award each year to an outstanding young woman scientist or engineer,
[42]
while the University of California at
San Diego hosts an annual Maria Goeppert Mayer symposium, bringing together female researchers to discuss
current science.
[43]
Crater Goeppert Mayer on Venus with a diameter of about 35 km is also named after
Goeppert-Mayer.
[44]
In 2011, she was included in the third issuance of the American Scientists collection of US
postage stamps, along with Melvin Calvin, Asa Gray, and Severo Ochoa.
[45]
Her papers are in the Geisel
Library at the University of California at San Diego.
[46]
List of female Nobel laureates
^
a

b
Ferry 2003, p. 18. 1.
^ Sachs 1979, p. 311. 2.
^ Dash 1973, p. 236. 3.
^ Sachs 1979, p. 312. 4.
^ Ferry 2003, p. 23. 5.
^ Dash 1973, pp. 233234. 6.
^
a

b
Sachs 1979, p. 313. 7.
^ Dash 1973, p. 250. 8.
^ Goeppert-Mayer M (1931). "ber Elementarakte mit zwei Quantensprngen". Annals of Physics 9 (3): 273295.
Bibcode:1931AnP...401..273G (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1931AnP...401..273G). doi:10.1002/andp.19314010303
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002%2Fandp.19314010303).
9.
^ Sachs 1979, p. 314. 10.
^ Kaiser, W.; Garrett, C.G.B. (1961). "Two-photon excitation in CaF
2
:Eu
2+
". Physical Review Letters 7 (6): 229232.
Bibcode:1961PhRvL...7..229K (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1961PhRvL...7..229K).
doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.7.229 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1103%2FPhysRevLett.7.229).
11.
^ "Two-Photon Absorption Measurements: Establishing Reference Standards." (http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin
/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA473083). Australian National University. June 8, 2007. Retrieved September 14, 2013.
12.
^ Dash 1973, p. 264. 13.
^
a

b

c

d
Sachs 1979, pp. 311-312. 14.
^ Dash 1973, pp. 258-259. 15.
^ Dash 1973, p. 265. 16.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Goeppert-Mayer
5 of 8 6/21/2014 9:47 PM
^ Wigner, Eugene P. (May 1972). "Maria Goeppert Mayer" (http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine
/physicstoday/article/25/5/10.1063/1.3070875). Physics Today 25 (5): 7779. doi:10.1063/1.3070875
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1063%2F1.3070875).
17.
^
a

b
Ferry 2003, pp. 40-45. 18.
^ Sachs 1979, p. 315. 19.
^ Kean 2010, pp. 2728, 31. 20.
^ Dash 1973, p. 283. 21.
^ Dash 1973, p. 284. 22.
^ Sachs 1979, p. 317. 23.
^
a

b

c
Sachs 1979, p. 318. 24.
^ Dash 1973, pp. 296-299. 25.
^ Schiebinger 1999, p. 59. 26.
^ Sachs 1979, pp. 319-320. 27.
^ Goeppert-Mayer, Maria (April 1950). "Nuclear configurations in the spin-orbit coupling model. I. Empirical
Evidence". Physical Review 78 (1): 1621. Bibcode:1950PhRv...78...16M (http://adsabs.harvard.edu
/abs/1950PhRv...78...16M). doi:10.1103/PhysRev.78.16 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1103%2FPhysRev.78.16).
28.
^ Goeppert-Mayer, Maria (April 1950). "Nuclear Configurations in the Spin-Orbit Coupling Model. II. Theoretical
Considerations". Physical Review 78 (1): 2223. Bibcode:1950PhRv...78...22M (http://adsabs.harvard.edu
/abs/1950PhRv...78...22M). doi:10.1103/PhysRev.78.22 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1103%2FPhysRev.78.22).
29.
^ Sachs 1979, p. 322. 30.
^ Sachs 1979, pp. 320-321. 31.
^
a

b
"Maria Goeppert-Mayer" (http://www.nndb.com/people/847/000099550/). Soylent Communications. Retrieved
September 14, 2013.
32.
^ Dash 1973, p. 316. 33.
^ Jensen, J. Hans D. (June 1949). "On the "Magic Numbers" in Nuclear Structure". Physical Review 75 (11):
17661766. Bibcode:1949PhRv...75R1766H (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1949PhRv...75R1766H).
doi:10.1103/PhysRev.75.1766.2 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1103%2FPhysRev.75.1766.2).
34.
^ Goeppert-Mayer, Maria (June 1949). "On Closed Shells in Nuclei. II". Physical Review 75 (12): 19691970.
Bibcode:1949PhRv...75.1969M (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1949PhRv...75.1969M). doi:10.1103/PhysRev.75.1969
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1103%2FPhysRev.75.1969).
35.
^ Sachs 1979, p. 323. 36.
^ "Maria Goeppert Mayer - facts" (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1963/mayer-facts.html).
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1963. NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 9 July 2013.
37.
^ Ferry 2003, p. 87. 38.
^ Sachs 1979, pp. 322-323. 39.
^ Ferry 2003, pp. 84-86. 40.
^ "Maria Goeppert Mayer Award" (http://www.aps.org/programs/honors/awards/goeppert-mayer.cfm). American
Physical Society. Retrieved September 14, 2013.
41.
^ "Maria Goeppert Mayer is role model for women scientists" (http://www.ne.anl.gov/About/hn/news961213.shtml).
Argonne National Laboratory. Retrieved September 14, 2013.
42.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Goeppert-Mayer
6 of 8 6/21/2014 9:47 PM
^ "A Tradition Flowers: The Maria Goeppert Mayer Interdisciplinary Symposium at SDSC" (http://www.sdsc.edu
/pub/envision/v17.2/flowers.html). San Diego Supercomputer Center. Retrieved September 14, 2013.
43.
^ "Space Images: Venus - Stereo Image Pair of Crater Goeppert Mayer" (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages
/details.php?id=PIA00269). Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Retrieved September 14, 2013.
44.
^ "American Scientists" (http://www.uspsstamps.com/stamps/american-scientists). US Postal Service. Retrieved
October 15, 2013.
45.
^ "Register of Maria Goeppert Mayer Papers" (http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/testing/html/mss0020a.html).
University of California, San Diego. Retrieved September 14, 2013.
46.
Dash, Joan (1973). A life of One's Own: Three Gifted Women and the Men they Married. New York:
Harper & Row. ISBN 9780060109493. OCLC 606211 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/606211).
Ferry, Joseph (2003). Maria Goeppert Mayer. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers.
ISBN 0791072479. OCLC 50730923 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/50730923).
Kean, Sam (2010). The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales from the Periodic Table of the
Elements. New York: Little, Brown and Co. ISBN 9780552777506.
Sachs, Robert (1979). Biographical Memoir Maria Goeppert Mayer 1906 1972
(http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/mayer-maria.pdf).
Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved September 14, 2013.
Schiebinger, Londa (1999). Has Feminism Changed Science?. London, England: Harvard University
Press. ISBN 0-674-38113-0.
Wuensch, Daniela (2013). Der letzte Physiknobelpreis fr eine Frau? Maria Goeppert Mayer: Eine
Gttingerin erobert die Atomkerne. Nobelpreis 1963. Zum 50. Jubilum. Gttingen, Germany: Termessos
Verlag. pp. 148, 44 photos, 2 diagrams. ISBN 9783938016152.
Opfell, Olga S. (1978). The Lady Laureates: Women who have won the Nobel Prize. Metuchen, N.J.:
Scarecrow Press. pp. 194208. ISBN 0810811618.
Biography and Bibliographic Resources (http://www.osti.gov/accomplishments/mayer.html), from the
Office of Scientific and Technical Information, United States Department of Energy
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maria_Goeppert-Mayer&oldid=609791026"
Categories: 1906 births 1972 deaths American nuclear physicists Columbia University faculty
University of Gttingen alumni German nuclear physicists German emigrants to the United States
Maria Goeppert-Mayer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Goeppert-Mayer
7 of 8 6/21/2014 9:47 PM
Johns Hopkins University faculty Sarah Lawrence College faculty
University of California, San Diego faculty Nobel laureates in Physics American Nobel laureates
German Nobel laureates People from Katowice People from the Province of Silesia Women physicists
Women Nobel laureates Manhattan Project people
This page was last modified on 23 May 2014 at 10:09.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may
apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia is a registered
trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Goeppert-Mayer
8 of 8 6/21/2014 9:47 PM