Maria Goeppert Mayer, German-born American Theoretical Physicist

Maria, born in Germany was the only child of a professor who understood the value of education. She attended Gottingen University, a rarity for a woman then and planned to become mathematician. However, she found her true niche in studying physics. In 1930, she received her doctorate in theoretical physics and met her future husband, an American who was also working in physics. That same year, they moved to New York where she continued her research and taught part time at both Columbia and Sarah Lawrence College. At Columbia, she became part of the Manhattan Project exploring the potential of separating isotopes by photochemical reactions and in 1945 went to the lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico, to work with Edward Teller on the super bomb. After the war, she returned to Chicago and “developed a mathematical model for the structure of nuclear shells” for which she received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963. Her model was an important discovery in the development of nuclear physics. She was only the second female Nobel Laureate in physics; Marie Curie was the first. She died at the age of sixty-six in San Diego, California.