She had a tiny office, little pay, and no significant official responsibilities. She was not considered eligible for an appointment at the same university as her husband, but rather was considered a volunteer associate, what her biographer Joan Dash calls a 'fringe benefit' wife. Goeppert-Mayer found it difficult to adjust. Her family name was anglicized to 'Goeppert.') Soon after her marriage she completed her doctorate with a thesis entitled 'On Elemental Processes with Two Quantum Jumps.'Īfter Joseph Mayer finished his studies, the young scientists moved to the United States, where he had been offered a job at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. (When they later moved to the United States, the spelling of When they married, in 1930, Maria adopted the hyphenated form of their names. Over the next several years, Maria and Joe became close, going hiking, skiing, swimming and playing tennis. One was an American physical chemistry student from California, Joseph E. Upon her return to Göttingen, her mother began taking student boarders into their grand house. She spent a semester in Cambridge, England, where she learned English and met Ernest Rutherford, the discoverer of the electron. She continued her study, determined to finish her doctorate in physics. Her prospects of being taken seriously were slim: there was only one female professor at Göttingen, and she taught for 'love,' receiving no salary. Göppert, now enrolled as a student, began attending Max Born's physics seminars and decided to study physics instead of mathematics, with an eye toward teaching. Noted physicist Max Born joined the Göttingen faculty and became a close friend of Göppert's family. Many well-known physicists visited Göttingen, including Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist who developed a model of the atom. The University of Göttingen that Göppert entered in 1924 was in the process of becoming a center for the study of quantum mechanics-the mathematical study of the behavior of atomic particles. Nonetheless, she took and passed her university entrance exam. The school went bankrupt when Göppert had completed only two of the customary three years of preparatory school.

Maria Göppert attendedĪ small private school run by female suffragists to ready young girls for university studies. After the war, life was still hard because of postwar inflation and food shortages. When Maria was just eight, World War I interrupted the family's rather idyllic university life with harsh wartime deprivation. Because the Göpperts came from several generations of university professors, it was unstated but expected that Maria would continue the family tradition. His philosophy on child rearing had a profound effect on his daughter, who idolized her father and treasured her long country walks with him, collecting fossils and learning the names of plants. Göppert was a most progressive pediatrician for the times, as he started a well-baby clinic and believed that all children, male or female, should be adventuresome risk-takers. Maria's mother, Maria Wolff Göppert, was a former teacher of piano and French who delighted in entertaining faculty members with lavish dinner parties and providing a home filled with flowers and music for her only daughter.ĭr. Situated in an old medieval town, the university had historically been respected for its mathematics department, but was on its way to becoming the European center for yet another discipline-theoretical physics. Friedrich Göppert, was appointed professor of pediatrics at the University at Göttingen, Germany. The two scientists, who had reached the same conclusions independently, later collaborated on a book explaining their model.Īn only child, Goeppert-Mayer was born Maria Göppert on July 28, 1906, in the German city of Kattowitz in Upper Silesia (now Katowice, Poland). In 1963, for her work on nuclear structure, she became the first woman awarded the Nobel Prize for theoretical physics, sharing the prize with J.

Through her theoretical research with nuclear physicists Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller, Goeppert-Mayer developed a model for the structure of atomic nuclei. Maria Goeppert-Mayer was one of the inner circle of nuclear physicists who developed the atomic fission bomb at the secret laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II.

University of chicago 1930 dr. mayer