Meinhard Edwin Mayer (March 18, 1929 – December 11, 2011) was a Romanian–born American Professor Emeritus of Physics and Mathematics at the University of California, Irvine, which he joined in 1966.
He experienced both the Soviet occupation of Northern Bukovina and, as a Jew, deportation to the Transnistria Governorate.
His research interests ranged from geometric methods in gauge theory, to the application of wavelets in turbulence.
He was an early contributor (1958) to the theory of vector-bosons (W and Z bosons) and electro-weak unification, which later became the Standard model, and an early advocate of the use of fiber bundles in gauge theory.
He was a co-author (with Gerald Jay Sussman and Jack Wisdom) of Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001 ISBN 0-262-19455-4