Maria Goëppert-Mayer

Born in 1906, an only child, her father was Professor of Paediatrics at the University of Göttingen. In 1924 she obtained, with honorary mention, the baccalaureate, something exceptional at the time.

She studied Mathematics and physics at the University of Göttingen and completed his doctoral thesis with Max Born (who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954).

At that time, she met Joseph E. Mayer, an American Rockefeller Foundation scholar, whom she married in 1930 and with whom she went to Baltimore. She worked there without any remuneration.

In 1946 they moved to Chicago; Maria was able to work, without pay, at the Institute of Nuclear Physics and at the Argonne National Laboratory.

In 1948 she began researching atomic nuclei with “magic numbers” of protons or neutrons and postulated her model of the layers of the nucleus for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963.

She actively advocated the inclusion of women in science careers in numerous lectures and articles, in which she pointed to the desirability of a “comprehensive” partner such as her husband. She had two children. She passed away in 1972.