We wrote about the life of Maria Goeppert Mayer, who continued her research and won the second Nobel Prize in physics, at a time when women were not recognized academically and her work was accepted thanks to her husband.
Her real name is Maria Goppert, she was born on June 28, 1906 in Kattowitz, a Silesian city. She was born the only child of her father, pediatrician Friedrich Goppert, and mother, Maria née Wolff. She moved with her family to Göttingen in 1910, when her father was appointed professor of pediatrics at the University of Göttingen.
Educated at the Höhere Technische in Göttingen, Maria attended the Frauenstudium in 1921, a private high school aimed at preparing girls for university. In addition to taking the university entrance exam, abitur, a year early, she enrolled with four girls and thirty boys from her school.
Maria entered the University of Göttingen in the spring of 1924, where she studied mathematics. But despite the so-called lack of female mathematics teachers in her schools, she gave up when she saw that unemployment was high and became interested in physics. Deciding to pursue her doctorage degree, Maria wrote in her 1930 thesis on the theory of possible two-photon absorption by atoms.
Unable to verify her thesis experimentally, Maria took a chance with the development of the laser and the detection of two-photon-evoked fluorescence in a europium-doped crystal, and in 1961 she made the first experimental confirmation. Because of her fundamental contribution in this field, the two-photon absorption cross section unit was named "GM".
On January 19, 1930, Maria married American Rockefeller member Joseph Edward Mayer, whom she met while on board with her family. Mayer was also one of the assistants to physicist James Franck. The couple has two children named Maria Ann and Peter Conrad.
Due to strict rules against "nepotism", Johns Hopkins University was prevented from hiring Maria as a faculty member. These rules have lost their original purpose and were primarily used to prevent the employment of married women teaching staff. Given a job as an assistant in the physics department working with German correspondence, Maria received a meager salary, a place to work, and access to facilities.
There was little interest in quantum mechanics at university, but Maria worked in the field with physicist Karl Herzfeld. Maria collaborated with Herzfeld's student on several papers, including an article on the benzene spectrum. Also, returning to Göttingen in the summers of 1931, 1932 and 1933 to study with the former examiner Born, Maria wrote an article with Born for "Handbuch der Physik". Her work ended when the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, and many academics lost their jobs. Concerned by the 1933 anti-Semitic laws to dismiss professors of Jewish descent, Maria and Herzfeld became involved in refugee relief efforts.
Her husband, Mayer, who was fired in 1937, attributed this to the dean of physical sciences' misogyny, which she thought was provoked by Maria's presence in the laboratory. Mayer, who took a position arranged by the head of physics department at Columbia University, George B. Pegram, did not receive any salary from there. Along with physical chemist Harold Urey and physicist Enrico Fermi, who came to Columbia in 1939, Mayer took their families with them to live in nearby Leonia, New Jersey. Fermi offered Mayer to investigate the valence shell of undiscovered transuranic elements. He planned to construct a new sequence similar to rare earth elements using the Thomas-Fermi model, and this plan proved correct.
In December 1941, Maria began teaching science part-time at Sarah Lawrence College, making it her first paid professional position. The following year, Maria joined the Manhattan Project when the United States entered World War II, and took a part-time research position at Columbia University's Substitute Alloy Materials (SAM) Laboratories. The goal of this project was to find a way to separate the fissile "uranium-235" isotope in natural uranium, and Maria has done a lot of work on this topic. The methods he wanted to do at the time proved impractical, and it was later realized that these methods could be done with the development of lasers.
Through her friend, physicist Edward Teller, Maria was given a new assignment and position at Columbia, called "Project Opacity," investigating the properties of matter and radiation at extremely high temperatures for the development of Teller's wartime program, the "Super" bomb. In February 1945, her husband, Marey, was sent to the Pacific War and left her family in New York to join the group at Los Alamos Laboratory. The family later returned to New York in July 1945.
In February 1946, Mayer became a professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Chemistry and at the new Institute for Nuclear Studies, and Maria became a volunteer professor of physics at the same school. Work continued on the "Opacity Project", with Teller accepting a position there. Offered a part-time job as a senior physicist in the theoretical physics department at Argonne National Laboratory, established July 1, 1946, Maria did the work of programming the Aberdeen Proving Ground's ENIAC to solve the criticality problems of a liquid metal-cooled reactor using the Monte Carlo method.
Maria during her time in the 1940s, she developed a mathematical model for the structure of nuclear projectiles, which she published in 1950. In this model, explaining why a certain number of nucleons in an atomic nucleus results in particularly stable configurations, Maria realized that she had numbers that Eugene Wigner called magic numbers. These numbers are respectively: 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82 and 126.
Realizing that the nucleus is a series of closed shells, Maria added that neutron and proton pairs tend to bind together. Three German scientists, also tried to solve the same problem and came to the same conclusion independently of Maria. The results of these three scientists were published by the journal Physical Review in June 1949, while Maria's work was announced later, although it was received in February 1949. Later collaborating with them, Maria, together with Hans Jensen, wrote a book called "Elementary Theory of Nuclear Shell Structure" in 1950. Elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1956, Maria shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics with Jensen and Wigner "for their discovery of nuclear shell structure".
Appointed full professor of physics at the University of California in 1960, Maria continued to teach and research for several more years, although she suffered a stroke shortly after. Maria, who received the American Academy of Achievement's Gold Plate Award in 1965, died on February 20, 1972, in California, after falling into a coma. She was buried in El Camino Memorial Park in San Diego.
The "Maria Goeppert Mayer Prize" was created after Maria's death by the "American Physical Society" (APS) to honor young female physicists at the start of their careers. The University of California hosts the annual "Maria Goeppert Mayer" symposium that brings together female researchers to discuss current science. Also, the "Goeppert Mayer Crater" on Venus, about 35 km in diameter, was named after Maria. Maria appeared in the third edition of the American Scientists USA postage stamp collection in 2011. Her papers are in the Geisel Library at the University of California and in "Mayer Hall", the university's physics department, named after Maria and her husband.