Maria Goeppert-Mayer

On January 19, 1930, Goeppert married Joseph Edward Mayer, an American Rockefeller fellow who was one of the assistants to the scientist, James Franck.

After marriage, the couple moved to Mayer's home country, the United States. They had two children, Maria Ann and Peter Conrad.

On February 20, 1972, Maria Goeppert Mayer died in San Diego, California, after a stroke left her comatose.

Maria Gerturd Käte Goeppert was born on June 28, 1906, in Kattowitz, a city in Prussia. She was the only child of Maria Wolff Goeppert and Friedrich Goeppert. Friedrich was professor of paediatrics at Georgia Augusta University in Göttingen.

Göppert was educated at Höhere Technische in Göttingen, a school for girls aspiring higher education.

In 1921, she entered the Frauenstudium, a private high school run by suffragettes that prepared girls for university entrance examination.

Göppert passed the exam and in 1924 entered the University of Göttingen to study mathematics.

Very soon, she became interested in physics, and got enrolled in the Ph.D. program.

She shifted to the US with her husband where he had been offered a position of an associate professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins University but since Maria had no regular academic appointment there, she taught occasional courses in the chemistry department.

From 1930 to 1939, she collaborated with her husband and the theoretical chemical physicist Karl F. Herzfeld in the fields of chemical physics and physical chemistry.

Her most important research before 1949 was a paper she wrote with Alfred Lee Sklar, a student at the Catholic University of America on how chemical structure determines optical properties.

Her work in the analysis of the spectra of complex systems based on the Hund-Mulliken approximation was elaborated in 1939 when Sklar collaborated with Hertha Sponer, Lothar Nordheim, and Edward Teller on a systematic analysis of the benzene spectrum.

In 1940, Mayer and her husband published a textbook ‘Statistical Mechanics’, on the quantum mechanical basis of statistical mechanics to chemists.

Her most famous work is her theory that the nucleus consists of several shells or orbital levels, and that the degree of stability of each kind of nucleus depends on the distribution of protons and neutrons among these shells. In June 1949, she announced the results of her research. Three German scientists, Otto Haxel, J. Hans D. Jensen, and Hans Suess, also arrived at the same conclusion at the same time.