When in 1963 she received the Nobel Prize in Physics, Maria Goeppert Mayer was the second woman in history to win that prize—the first being Marie Curie, who had received it sixty years earlier—and she was the third woman in history to receive the Nobel Prize in a science category. This accomplishment had its beginnings in her early exposure to an intense atmosphere of science, both at home and in the surrounding university community, a community that provided her with the opportunity to follow her inclinations and to develop her remarkable talents under the guidance of the great teachers and scholars of mathematics and physics. Throughout her full and gracious life, her science continued to be the theme about which her activities were centered, and it culminated in her major contribution to the understanding of the structure of the atomic nucleus, the spin–orbit‐coupling shell model of nuclei.
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February 1982
February 01 1982
Maria Goeppert‐Mayer—two‐fold pioneer
Although Maria Mayer made significant contributions (leading to the Nobel Prize) starting in 1930, it was 30 years before she received a full‐time faculty appointment.
Physics Today 35 (2), 46–51 (1982);