THE NUCLEUS Issue 2 Spring 2024

MARIA GEOPPERT MAYER

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by Lillian Pao

Born in Germany in 1906, she grew up as an only child of a sixth-generation academic, and was expected to go to university. Her father had told her that she ‘shouldn’t grow up to be a woman’, by which he meant a housewife. There was only one school for girls in Germany at the time of her education, which had closed one year before she was due to graduate. Despite this, she still took a university entrance exam and passed along with only 4 other girls. At the University of Gottingen (in 1924), she was tutored by Max Born (who would go on to win a Nobel Prize in 1954), and was a fellow student of Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi, with whom she became a close associate. At this time, only 1 out of 10 students were girls. Initially intending to study maths, she later felt that physics was more interesting and she was awarded her PhD in 1930. Exactly 60 years after Marie Curie, Maria Goeppert Mayer became the second woman ever to win a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 prize.

Her Scientific Career Due to anti-nepotism laws at the time, Mayer was not paid for her work. For three decades, she worked as a ‘research associate’ or ‘volunteer associate professor’ at several universities including the Johns Hopkins University and was not given a salary or a full-time position at any of the institutions. Throughout her career, she engaged in many significant research initiatives, including a brief participation in the Manhattan project with Edward Teller (on the hydrogen bomb) and other top-secret bomb research (such as enriching uranium for atomic bombs). She was strongly anti-Hitler but was worried that her contributions to bomb research would be used against her German friends and family, thus she later expressed relief that the project had failed. After the war, she returned to part-time research positions and soon began to explore her Nobel Prize-winning idea of the nuclear shell model. She was 58 years old at the time she finally became a full professor in 1960 at the University of San Diego, which had been 10 years since her discovery of the nuclear shell model, and 30 years since the beginning of her scientific career.

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