When was Maria Goeppert Mayer born?

Maria Goeppert Mayer was born on 28 June 1906 in Katowice.

Where did Maria Goeppert Mayer study?

Maria Goeppert Mayer was educated at University of Göttingen.

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Maria Goeppert Mayer

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German-born American theoretical physicist (1906-1972)

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Maria Goeppert Mayer (German: [maˈʁiːa ˈɡœpɐt ˈmaɪɐ] ; née Göppert; June 28, 1906 – February 20, 1972) was a German–American theoretical physicist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Wigner. One half of the prize was awarded jointly to Goeppert Mayer and Jensen "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure." She was the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, the first being Marie Curie in 1903. In 1986, the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award for early-career women physicists was established in her honor.

Quick facts

Born: 28 June 1906 wd
Place of birth: Katowice wd
Died: 20 February 1972 wd
Place of death: San Diego wd
Citizenship: Germany, United States wd
Occupation: physicist, nuclear physicist, university teacher, scientist wd
Education: University of Göttingen wd
Spouse: Joseph Edward Mayer wd

Awards wd

Nobel Prize in Physics (1963)
National Women's Hall of Fame (1996)
Fellow of the American Physical Society
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Golden Plate Award (1965)

About

A graduate of the University of Göttingen, Goeppert Mayer wrote her doctoral thesis on the theory of possible two-photon absorption by atoms. At the time, the chances of experimentally verifying her thesis seemed remote, but the development of the laser in the 1960s later permitted this. Today, the unit for the two-photon absorption cross section is called the Goeppert Mayer (GM) unit.

Maria Goeppert married American 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. In 1937, she moved to Columbia University, where she took an unpaid position. 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…

Questions

When was Maria Goeppert Mayer born?: Maria Goeppert Mayer was born on 28 June 1906 in Katowice.
Where did Maria Goeppert Mayer study?: Maria Goeppert Mayer was educated at University of Göttingen.

Sources

Last updated 1 November 2026 · facts checked 5 November 2026

Cite this page

"Maria Goeppert Mayer". DigiNepal. Last updated 1 November 2026. https://diginpl.com/people/maria-goeppert-mayer. Retrieved 6 November 2026.

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Text from the Wikipedia article Maria Goeppert Mayer, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. This page's text is shared under the same licence. Facts from Wikidata (CC0). Image: Maria Goeppert-Mayer.jpg — Nobel foundation, Public domain.

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