Scientific and Luminary Biography - Maria Goeppert Mayer

Maria Geoppert Mayer

Maria Goeppert Mayer was born June 28, 1906. She was born in Kattowitz (now Katowice, Poland).

In 1924, Goeppert passed the abitur, making her eligible to enter university, and enrolled at Göttingen university in the fall. Among her professors at Göttingen were three future Nobel prize winners: Max Born, James Franck and Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus. Goeppert completed her Doctor of Philosophy degree (Ph.D.) at the University of Göttingen in 1930.

Goeppert-Mayer was offered a part-time job at Argonne National Laboratory as a Senior Physicist in the Theoretical Physics Division. It was during her time at Chicago and Argonne that she developed a mathematical model for the structure of nuclear shells, the work for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963, shared with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Paul Wigner. Goeppert-Mayer's model explained "why certain numbers of nucleons in the nucleus of an atom cause an atom to be extremely stable". This had been baffling scientists for some time. These numbers are called "magic numbers". She postulated, against the received wisdom of the time, that the nucleus is like a series of closed shells and pairs of neutrons and protons like to couple together in what is called spin orbit coupling. Goeppert-Mayer died in San Diego, California, in 1972.

About the Argonne National Laboratory Named Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

Argonne offers these special postdoctoral fellowships to be awarded internationally on an annual basis to outstanding doctoral scientists and engineers who are at early points in promising careers. The fellowships are named after scientific and technical luminaries who have been associated with the laboratory, its predecessors and the University of Chicago since the 1940s. Read more about the program »

December 2012