[2] He was married to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer from 1930 until her death in 1972.
He went to work with James Franck in Göttingen, Germany, in 1929, where he met Maria, a student of Max Born.
He was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences (1946),[3] the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1958),[4] and the American Philosophical Society (1970).
[5] Joseph Mayer was president of the American Physical Society from 1973 to 1975.
He developed the cluster expansion method and Mayer-McMillan solution theory.