Mayer, Maria Goeppert (1906–1972)

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Mayer, Maria Goeppert (1906–1972)

German-American physicist who was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for theoretical physics, awarded in 1963 for her explanation of the nuclear shell model theory . Name variations: Maria or Marie Goeppert-Mayer; Göppert, Geoppart, or Geoppert. Pronunciation: GER-pert MAY-er. Born Maria Gertrud Käte Göppert on June 28, 1906, in Kattowitz, Upper Silesia (now Katowice, Poland); died in San Diego, California, on February 20, 1972, of a pulmonary embolism; daughter of Friedrich Göppert (a pediatrician and professor of medicine at Georgia Augusta University in Göttingen, Germany) and Maria Wolff Göppert (a schoolteacher and musician); graduated Georgia Augusta University, Ph.D., 1930; married Joseph Edward Mayer, on January 18, 1930; children: Maria Anne Mayer (b. 1933); Peter Conrad Mayer (b. 1938).

Worked as "volunteer associate" at Johns Hopkins University (1931–39); was lecturer in chemistry at Columbia University (1939–45); was a research physicist for Substitute Alloy Materials Project (1942–45); was senior physicist for Institute for Nuclear Studies and Argonne National Laboratory at the University of Chicago (1945–59); published theory of nuclear shell model in Physical Review (1948); co-wrote Statistical Mechanics in 1940 and Elementary Theory of Nuclear Shell Structure (1955); was the fifth woman elected to National Academy of Sciences (1956); named professor and given salary at the University of California at San Diego (1959–72); awarded Nobel Prize in Physics (1963).

Selected writings:

(with Max Born) "Dynamische Gittertheorie der Kristalle," in Handbuch der Physik (Band 24, part 2, 1931, pp. 623–794); (with R.G. Sachs) "Calculations on a New Neutron-Proton Interaction Potential," in Physical Review (vol. 53, 1938, pp. 991–993); (with A.L. Sklar) "Calculations of the Lower Excited Levels of Benzene," in Journal of Chemical Physics (vol. 6, 1938, pp. 643–652); (with Joseph E. Mayer) Statistical Mechanics (NY: Wiley, 1940); "On Closed Shells in Nuclei," in Physical Review (vol. 74, 1948, pp. 235–239); "On Closed Shells in Nuclei, II," in Physical Review (vol. 75, 1949, pp. 1969–1970); (with Edward Teller) "On the Origin of the Elements," in Physical Review (vol. 76, 1949, pp. 1226–1231); "Nuclear Configurations in the Spin-Orbit Coupling Model. I. Empirical Evidence," in Physical Review (vol. 78, 1950, pp. 16–21); "Nuclear Configurations in the Spin-Orbit Coupling Model. II. Theoretical Considerations," in Physical Review (vol. 78, 1950, pp. 22–23); "The Structure of the Nucleus," in Scientific American (March 1951, pp. 22–26); (with J.H.D. Jensen) "Electromagnetic Effects Due to Spin-Orbit Coupling," in Physical Review (vol. 85, 1952, p. 1059); (with J.H.D. Jensen) Elementary Theory of Nuclear Shell Structure (NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1955); "The Shell Model," in Science (vol. 145, 1964, pp. 999–1006); "The Shell Model," in Les Prix Nobel en 1963 (Stockholm: The Nobel Foundation, 1964); (with J.H.D. Jensen) "The Shell Model. I. Shell Closure and jj Coupling," in Alpha-, Beta- and Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy (edited by Kai Siegbahn, Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing, 1965, p. 557).

Maria Gertrud Käte Göppert, whose family name was later Anglicized to Goeppert, was born on June 28, 1906, at Kattowitz in Upper Silesia, a German province now in Poland. The only child of a medical professor who was the sixth generation in his family of professors, she moved with her parents, Friedrich and Maria Wolff Göppert , to the medieval university town of Göttingen four years later. Mayer's father became director of a children's hospital as well as a professor, and established a day-care center for children of working mothers; her mother was a schoolteacher and a musician.

Maria was a thin, pale child who suffered painful headaches. Her father was a gentle man, who loved children and emphasized that they should be self-confident and adventurous and not limited by their parents' fears. He urged his daughter to be curious and a risk taker, taking her on fossil searches and crafting dark lenses for her to use in watching solar eclipses. After attempting various cures for his daughter's migraines, he finally told her that he was unable to mitigate the pain, and that she could either be an invalid or learn to ignore them; Mayer chose the latter.

Friedrich also counseled his daughter to "never become just a woman," a comment on the times that demanded women be solely housewives, interested only in their husbands and children. Mayer followed her father's advice, but her 40-year career, spanning original scientific research and teaching at four universities, and culminating in a Nobel Prize, was filled with numerous ironies.

From an early age, Maria's goal was to be educated at Georgia Augusta University, more commonly referred to as the University of Göttingen. "Ever since I was a very small child," she noted, "I knew that when I grew up I was expected to acquire some training or education which would enable me to earn a living so that I was not dependent on marriage." In Göttingen, she attended the Hohere Tochterschule, or public elementary school, where she was an excellent student, especially in mathematics and languages. At age 15, she matriculated in a private school, the Frauenstudium, which had been established by suffragists because the city had no advanced public schools for girls. Prepared by her teachers, Mayer successfully passed the series of written and oral examinations, known as the abitur, that admitted her to the University of Göttingen as a mathematics student in the spring of 1924.

In Germany, the interim separating World Wars I and II, known as the Weimar Republic, was a period of extraordinary artistic and scientific creativity. The development of quantum mechanics by physicists during the 1920s and 1930s is considered by many historians to be the greatest intellectual achievement of the 20th century, and much of the ground-breaking research in the field was carried out at the University of Göttingen. The university was renowned for attracting superb scientific talent, particularly mathematicians and physicists, who brought the work there to its apex in the pre-Hitler years.

When Mayer began her course work, only ten percent of German university students were female, compared to at least one third of American college students during the same period. At Göttingen, a university rule allowed professors to refuse women admittance to their classes, few women professors were hired to teach, and most female students were there to become schoolteachers, a career that Mayer considered to be boring. The only woman in many of her classes, Mayer nonetheless thrived in the scholarly, male-dominated environment, and was often the best student in her courses. At a time when the methodology of quantum mechanics was fast maturing, she found mentors among the prominent scientists who were at work on discovering the atomic properties of matter. Max Born was the eminent atomic physicist who had initiated quantum mechanics research, and when Mayer was invited to join his seminar, her interest in physics blossomed. Born encouraged her to join in the pioneering effort of discovering the new physics methodology and served as her thesis advisor. "This was wonderful," as Mayer later recalled. "I liked the mathematics in it…. Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle-solving…. Physics is puzzle-solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man…. Physics was the challenge."

Mayer was exceptionally strong in the mathematical concepts necessary to an understanding of quantum mechanics, and she found quantum mechanics, in contrast to her mathematics studies, "young and exciting." James Franck, who won a 1925 Nobel Prize for his theories of atomic structures, also taught her non-mathematical approaches to problem resolution. In a joint seminar taught by Born and Franck, students were expected to challenge the professors, who were often delivering new ideas about quantum mechanics within hours of their discoveries. In her advanced theory seminar, her classmates included Robert Oppenheimer, the future creator of the atomic bomb, who interrupted Born so much that Mayer circulated a student petition requesting that he be quiet. After eating with her mother at home, Maria would daily eat a second course with friends from her physics classes in order to debate the issues of quantum mechanics while they ate.

Following the unexpected death of her father in 1927, Mayer decided to pursue a doctorate as a tribute to him. In 1928, she won a German government fellowship to spend a term at Girton College at Cambridge University, in England, where she met Ernest Rutherford, winner of the 1908 Nobel Prize for his nuclear theory. Her father's death resulted in another significant event in 1929: her mother, like many Göttingen widows, began taking in university students as boarders. In January of that year, Joseph Edward Mayer, a postdoctoral fellow from California who had some to Göttingen to study with Franck, was inquiring at the Göppert home about renting a room when he met the elegant, blue-eyed blonde Maria.

Maria had had many suitors, none of whom had mattered to her. Joe Mayer changed her mind about matrimony. When they became engaged, she even considered ceasing her physics work, but he insisted that she finish her degree and become a professor. When she doubted that she could compile a scholarly thesis, he took her to visit physicist Paul Ehrenfest, a close friend of Albert Einstein, to inspire her, and he also offered to hire a maid to do the cooking and cleaning chores that Maria despised. Throughout their marriage, he was to encourage Maria in her intellectual pursuits.

On January 18, 1930, Maria Goeppert married Joe Mayer at Göttingen city hall. After a party in her mother's home, the couple honeymooned in Berlin. Maria retained her family name, linking it with Joe's surname. By March, she had completed her dissertation "Über Elementarakte mit zwei Quantensprüngen" ("On Elemental Processes with Two Quantum Jumps"), which was approved by her committee, consisting of Born, Franck, and future Nobel Laureate Adolf Windaus. Mayer's academic mentors enthusiastically promoted her scientific talents, and she contributed a section to a book on quantum mechanics written by Born.

As Nazi policies in Germany restricted academia, many European scientists began to emigrate to the U.S. in pursuit of intellectual freedom. Ambitious as she was, Mayer began to realize that administrators' attitudes toward female professors would limit her career in Germany, and in 1931 she and Joe sailed on the S.S. Europa to Baltimore, Maryland, where Joe took up a new position at the Johns Hopkins University. Known now as Maria Goeppert Mayer, she began to encounter a new round of professional obstacles, becoming what Joan Dash has labeled the "fringe benefit" faculty wife.

At the time, universities in the United States observed rules of anti-nepotism, entrenched since the 1920s and reinforced during the Depression, which were designed to prevent married women from depriving male heads of households from income-generating jobs. Their practical result was also to restrict many women scholars and scientists with good credentials from acquiring jobs or status equivalent to their male peers. At Johns Hopkins, where Mayer was denied access to an academic position, her desire to pursue scientific work allowed the university to take advantage of her skills by using her as a "voluntary associate" in physics, working without salary or tenure, until 1939.

Refusing to allow Joe to protest her treatment in any way that might damage his own professional standing, Maria remained publicly modest and quiet while privately exercising her intense competitive drive to solve physics problems. Working out of an attic office, she cared only about the opinions of her scientific peers, and believed that most of them accepted her ability, although she felt snubbed by some administrators and colleagues. "I sensed the resentment very early," she recalled later, "so I simply learned to be inconspicuous. I never asked for anything, and I never complained."

American physicists advocated experimental work in place of theoretical investigations, and Johns Hopkins was not a major focal point for quantum mechanics research. American scientists preferred to explore the wave theory of physics, and the theoretical work in particle mechanics was still the general provenance of German scientists. Basing her research approach on techniques she had learned in Germany, Mayer began to collaborate with her husband and with theorist Karl Herzfeld, who hired her to translate his German correspondence. In addition to teaching these men quantum theory, Maria began to apply quantum mechanics to chemical experiments such as the structure of organic compounds, and wrote several significant papers on molecular physics. With Enrico Fermi and Ehrenfest, whom she had first met in Europe, she also taught European quantum mechanics to American physicists at the University of Michigan summer school.

During her first years in America, Mayer was deeply homesick and spent her summers in Göttingen. Marrying Joe had caused her to lose her German citizenship, and as Hitler grew more dominant in German politics, travel in her homeland became more difficult. Mayer retained upper-class German beliefs reflecting her Prussian heritage, and during the early Nazi regime she hoped that traditional German values and culture would overcome the rapid political changes. Disturbed by the 1933 racial laws imposed by the Nazis that ousted Jewish professors, she became treasurer of a fund to help German refugees, including Franck, who came to Baltimore, and she began to shelter exiles in her home. She also began to encounter anti-German sentiment in America, which would increase during the Second World War.

Shortly after the birth of her daughter, Maria Anne Mayer , in 1933, Mayer became a naturalized citizen. She stayed home for a while with her new daughter, trying to balance her family, social life, and career, but admitted, "There is an emotional strain due to the conflicting allegiances, that to science and that to the children who, after all, need a mother." Nevertheless, Mayer later reminisced that her years at Johns Hopkins were her happiest. In addition to research, she taught and supervised the doctoral thesis of graduate student Robert G. Sachs, and wrote an article with him on nuclear physics. But problems continued to plague her professional advancement. Herzfeld demanded a salary for her, contending, "Her mind is really brilliant and penetrating," but the university administration refused to pay her.

In the late 1930s, Mayer's mother died, and she became pregnant with her second child, Peter Conrad Mayer, who was born in 1938. While she was pregnant, she and Joe had initiated work on a textbook in statistical mathematics. Then Joe was unexpectedly dismissed by Johns Hopkins. While his department head proffered various reasons for his termination, including the need to reduce expenses, Mayer believed that academic jealousy of her was to blame, despite her diligent attempts not to alienate colleagues.

From 1939 to 1946, Joseph Mayer became a lecturer at Columbia University. Maria applied for a position in the physics department at Columbia but was refused. The only person at Columbia to support her was Harold Urey, chair of the chemistry department and a Nobel Prize winner in 1934. Urey wangled her a small teaching position and an office, and bestowed the title of "lecturer in chemistry" on her, enhancing her stature for the title page of the Mayers' book, Statistical Mechanics, published in 1940. Describing molecular systems, this chemistry textbook was considered a classic in the field. Joe received primary credit for the work, with most physicists erroneously assuming Maria Mayer had only performed secretarial duties; nevertheless, Maria received a letter from the American Physical Society in 1940, addressed "Dear Sir," which named her a fellow.

With America's entry into World War II in 1941, the small supply of skilled physicists in the United States led to Mayer's first paying job. Fearing that the Germans would develop an atomic bomb first, the U.S. government was funding research in nuclear fission, code-named the Manhattan Project, for the purpose of developing atomic weaponry, particularly a bomb. At Columbia, Urey was director of a secret research group as part of the Manhattan Project, and assigned Mayer to the Substitute Alloy Materials (SAM) project for research. Initially reluctant to take the time away from her children, Mayer compromised by hiring nannies and agreeing to work half-time. During this period, she also taught a basic science course at Sarah Lawrence College, which earned her a part-time salary.

Now, for the first time in her career, Mayer began to find herself being treated in the same way as her male counterparts were. She did not encounter discrimination by the government because she was a woman, and she was allocated supervisory roles, directing researchers. "Suddenly I was taken seriously, considered a good scientist," she said. "It was the beginning of myself standing on my own two feet as a scientist, not leaning on Joe."

While Mayer worked in New York, investigating the possibility of separating uranium isotopes—atoms of the same element but differing in the number of neutrons in the nucleus—through photochemical reactions, Joe conducted work on classified weaponry at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, in Maryland. Personal difficulties arose when Mayer discovered that nannies she had hired were abusive to her children, and her son was sickly and doing poorly in school, exacerbating her feelings of guilt for spending too much time on her work. A heavy drinker and chain smoker (known to puff on as many as four cigarettes at once), Mayer suffered declining health during the war, with pneumonia and a goiter, and underwent both thyroid and gallbladder surgery.

In May 1945, Mayer was assigned by Edward Teller, who would later design the hydrogen bomb, to the Columbia Opacity Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, to analyze the possible behavior of uranium compounds at high temperatures and pressures in thermonuclear explosions. Sworn to secrecy, Mayer was uncomfortable in being unable to share her thoughts on her research with Joe. She also continued to express a love for her homeland, blaming the war on Adolf Hitler and attempting to reconcile her fears that her research might be turned against Germans. "We failed. We found nothing, and we were lucky," she observed later, "because we didn't contribute to the development of the bomb, and so we escaped the searing guilt felt to this day by those responsible for the bomb." After the war, Mayer made visits to both Germany and Hiroshima, which she found excruciatingly painful, and she sent clothes and money to relief organizations to help in the recovery of postwar Germany.

After the war ended in 1945, Mayer accepted a position at the recently established Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago, which she would hold until 1959. Back in an atmosphere that resembled Göttingen, where colleagues were intellectually stimulating and encouraging, she observed, "This was the first place where I was not considered a nuisance but greeted with open arms by the administration." However, because of the university's nepotism rules, she received the title of full professor but, again, no salary. At Chicago, she taught physics-theory seminars, served on committees, hired faculty, advised graduate students, and established the standard of difficulty for graduate examinations.

Teller's Opacity Project continued at Chicago, and he hired Mayer as a part-time consultant at the Metallurgical Laboratory, where the initial work on nuclear chain reaction had occurred. Under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Argonne National Laboratory replaced the Metallurgical Laboratory on July 1, 1946, and Mayer was hired as a senior physicist by her former student, Sachs, who was now director of Argonne.

Mayer's work centered on a basic physics problem: why certain atoms are stable or unstable. She pursued, as a part of this puzzle, the question of why some isotopes are more abundant than others, and Teller proposed that she catalogue the nuclear properties of the stable elements to determine the number of neutrons or protons in each. Eugene P. Wigner, a Göttingen friend, had labeled the quantification of nuclear particles "magic numbers." Mayer determined a series of "magic numbers" (2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82,126) wherein the nuclei with those numbers of neutrons or protons were unusually stable. She then began to devise a model for the nucleus of atomic particles, in which there were concentric shells of protons and neutrons, a structure similar to electrons orbiting around the nucleus. When she made an analogy of the particles orbiting in shells to the layers of an onion "with nothing in the center," physicist Wolfgang Pauli dubbed her "The Madonna of the Onion."

Because Mayer lacked experimental proof to verify her concept of the shell model, she hesitated to publish her findings until her husband, fearing that she would lose her original claim to her work, insisted she submit her paper. In 1948, her treatise appeared in the Physical Review. Meanwhile, as a result of a chance remark by Fermi suggesting that she consider spin-orbit coupling, she arrived at the analogy that was to give support to her theory. Comparing the nucleus to a room full of waltzers, she saw the particles as orbiting and spinning in different directions like dancers in a ballroom, some needing more energy depending on which way they revolved. This difference in energy requirement caused by spin-orbit coupling strengthened the shells' positions in the nucleus, resulting in the occurrence of the "magic numbers" in the most tightly bound shells.

Again, however, Mayer was reluctant to publish her findings, fearing most physicists would reject her theory. Urged by Fermi and her husband, she nonetheless submitted her research results to the Physical Review in late 1949, and soon became aware that three German scientists, Hans Jensen, Hans E. Suess, and Otto Haxel, had simultaneously and independently proposed a similar theory. Initially upset, Mayer soon realized that their publication confirmed her work and would aid in convincing skeptical researchers of its validity. Although the shell theory countered previous nuclear physics methodology, the conclusions arrived at in these diverse ways led to its rather quick acceptance by the scientific community, and it became an essential model for studies of nuclear behavior and structure.

After Jensen suggested that he and Mayer write a book, she traveled to Germany in 1950, where they began a collaboration on advanced interpretation of their model. Mayer, well organized and diligent, was slowed down by Jensen's procrastination, but in 1955 they published Elementary Theory of Nuclear Shell Structure, the bulk of which was written by Mayer. By this time, the nuclear shell model was gaining her the international renown she had long hoped for, along with various professional laurels. In 1951, she was inducted into the Heidelberg Academy of Science, and eminent physicist Niels Bohr invited her to the Institute of Copenhagen. Five years later, she was the fifth woman ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.

In 1959, she officially achieved her long-sought goal as the seventh generation of college professors in her family. Harold Urey had transferred to the University of California at San Diego, where he offered her the position of professor with full salary and benefits. Chicago countered this offer with a full-time title and salary, but Mayer decided to move west. She was unpacking her voluminous library when she suffered a stroke that left her speech blurred and her left arm paralyzed; she had already suffered a loss of hearing in her left ear a few years earlier, which impeded her work. Now, although she attempted to continue her researching, she never fully recovered her health.

In 1963, Mayer became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for theoretical physics when she was awarded the honor along with Jensen and Wigner for their research on the structure of atomic nuclei. On December 12, 1963, she accepted her gold medal and diploma from Sweden's King Gustavus VI Adolfus in Stockholm, and in her Nobel lecture she described some of the difficulties of her struggle to gain acceptance for her ideas. Returning home, she was eager to continue her research, noting, "If you love science, all you really want is to keep on working. The Nobel Prize thrills you, but it changes nothing."

In San Diego, Mayer found the university environment invigorating, although she was limited by her health. With a pacemaker installed in her heart, she taught, did research, and refined the shell theory, writing several major articles in the 1960s. Her last publication was a review of the shell model with Jensen. She also became active politically, promoting civilian control of nuclear energy and protesting against the Vietnam War, and collected honorary doctorates in science from numerous colleges.

In December 1971, Maria Goeppert Mayer suffered heart failure and lapsed into a coma. On February 20, 1972, she died of a pulmonary embolism at her home in La Jolla, at age 65. She had overcome the obstacles of being a woman in the world of theoretical science and a German immigrant in the United States in the 1930s to rise to the top of her field, and she had avidly pursued the problems of physics until her death. She had also managed to balance a career, marriage, and family, raising a daughter, Maria Anne, who entered the field of astronomical research, and a son, Peter, who became the eighth generation of Goeppert professors, in the field of economics.

Mayer's papers were donated to the University of California at San Diego by her husband Joe, who had continually encouraged his wife to maintain her intellectual independence while forging a strong marriage and professional partnership. In the conglomeration of letters, scientific notes, manuscripts, menus, itineraries, and her daughter's report card that reside in those archives, is perhaps the best indication of what kind of woman Maria Goeppert Mayer ultimately defined herself to be.

sources:

Dash, Joan. "Maria Goeppert Mayer," in A Life of One's Own: Three Gifted Women and the Men They Married. NY: Harper and Row, 1973, pp. 229–346, 368–369.

McGrayne, Sharon Bertsch. Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1993.

Opfell, Olga S. "Madonna of the Onion: Maria Goeppert-Mayer," in The Lady Laureates: Women Who Have Won the Nobel Prize. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1986, pp. 224–238.

Rossiter, Margaret W. Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

Sachs, Robert G. "Maria Goeppert Mayer, June 28, 1906–February 20, 1972," in Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol. 50. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1979, pp. 310–328.

collections:

Autobiography and 1962 interview located in Autobiographies Collection and Oral History Collection, American Institute of Physics, New York City.

Biographical file, including bibliography, membership activity, and photograph, located in Deceased Members Records, National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council Archives, Washington, D.C.

Correspondence, manuscripts, lecture notes, photographs, and memorabilia located in Maria Goeppert Mayer Papers, Mandeville Department of Special Collections, University of California at San Diego.

Interview with Mayer and 1964 memoir located in Nobel Laureates on Scientific Research Oral History Collection, Columbia University, New York City.

Interview with Mayer by Thomas S. Kuhn, February 1962, and interview with James Franck and Hertha Sponer by Thomas S. Kuhn and Maria Goeppert Mayer, July 1962, held in Archive for History of Quantum Physics, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Interview with Mayer, February 1962, Archive for the History of Quantum Physics, University of California at Berkeley.

Elizabeth D. Schafer , Ph.D., freelance writer in history of technology and science, Loachapoka, Alabama

Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia