Maria Goeppert Mayer

Maria Goeppert Mayer (1906 to 1972) was a German-American theoretical physicist, born in Kattowitz and trained at the University of Göttingen. She shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Wigner, her half of the prize being awarded for the discovery of nuclear shell structure, the model that explains why nuclei with certain numbers of protons and neutrons are especially stable. She was the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, after Marie Curie. Earlier she published a landmark paper on double beta decay in 1935, and during the Second World War she worked at Columbia on isotope separation for the Manhattan Project. After the war she held a post at the University of Chicago and worked at Argonne National Laboratory before becoming a full professor at the University of California, San Diego in 1960.