Maria Goeppert Mayer (German: [maˈʁiːa ˈɡœpɐt ˈmaɪɐ] ⓘ; née Göppert; June 28, 1906 – February 20, 1972) was a German-American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus.

Maria Goeppert married chemist Joseph Edward Mayer and moved to the United States, where he was an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Strict rules against nepotism prevented Johns Hopkins University from taking her on as a faculty member, but she was given a job as an assistant and published a landmark paper on double beta decay in 1935.

During World War II, she worked for the Manhattan Project at Columbia on isotope separation, and with Edward Teller at the Los Alamos Laboratory on the development of thermonuclear weapons.

After the war, Goeppert Mayer became a voluntary associate professor of physics at the University of Chicago (where her husband and Teller worked) and a senior physicist at the university-run Argonne National Laboratory.

She developed a mathematical model for the structure of nuclear shells, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963, which she shared with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Wigner.

[19] The couple moved to Mayer's home country of the United States, where he had been offered a position as associate professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins University.

[24] Some [schools] even condescended to give her work, though they refused to pay her, and the topics were typically 'feminine', such as figuring out what causes colors … the University of Chicago finally took her seriously enough to make her a professor of physics.

Although she got her own office, the department still didn't pay her … When the Swedish academy announced in 1963 that she had won her profession's highest honor, the San Diego newspaper greeted her big day with the headline "S.D.

Concerned by the 1933 anti-Jewish laws that ousted professors of Jewish descent, Goeppert Mayer as well as Herzfeld became involved in refugee relief efforts.

He attributed this to the hatred of women on the part of the dean of physical sciences, which he thought was provoked by Goeppert Mayer's presence in the laboratory.

She soon made good friends with Harold Urey and Enrico Fermi, who arrived at Columbia in 1939,[31] with the three of them and their families living in nearby Leonia, New Jersey.

[34] In February 1945, Joe was sent to the Pacific War, and Goeppert Mayer decided to leave her children in New York and join Teller's group at the Los Alamos Laboratory.

When the nearby Argonne National Laboratory was founded on July 1, 1946, Goeppert Mayer was also offered a part-time job there as a senior physicist in the theoretical physics division.

"[36] She programmed the Aberdeen Proving Ground's ENIAC to solve criticality problems for a liquid metal cooled reactor using the Monte Carlo method.

During her time at Chicago and Argonne in the late 1940s, Goeppert Mayer developed a mathematical model for the structure of nuclear shells, which she published in 1950.

You may remember that Maria, when excited, had a rapid fire oral delivery, whereas Enrico always wanted a slow detailed and methodical explanation.

[57] Goeppert Mayer died in San Diego, California, on February 20, 1972, after a heart attack that had struck her the previous year left her comatose.

[43] After her death, the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award was created by the American Physical Society (APS) to honor young female physicists at the beginning of their careers.

Open to all female physicists who hold PhDs, the winner receives money and the opportunity to give guest lectures about her research at four major institutions.

[59] Argonne National Laboratory also honors her by presenting an award each year to an outstanding young woman scientist or engineer,[60] while the University of California, San Diego hosts an annual Maria Goeppert Mayer symposium, bringing together female researchers to discuss current science.

[63] In 2011, she was included in the third issuance of the American Scientists collection of US postage stamps, along with Melvin Calvin, Asa Gray, and Severo Ochoa.