PARA ⁿPAR@ ` TEXT ` ÷Mayer, Maria Goeppert1906╨1972physicistBorn on June 28, 1906, at Kattowitz, Germany (now Katowice, Poland), Maria Goeppert earned a doctorate in physics at the University of GÜttingen under a committee of three Nobel Prize winners, including Max Born, in 1930. In January of that year she married the American physical chemist Joseph E. Mayer, and a short time later she accompanied him to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Over the next nine years she was associated with Johns Hopkins as a volunteer associate. During that time she collaborated with Karl Herzfeld and her husband in the study of organic molecules. She became a citizen in 1933. In 1939 she and her husband both received appointments in chemistry at Columbia University. Their Statistical Mechanics appeared in 1940. Although they remained at Columbia throughout World War II, Maria Mayer also lectured at Sarah Lawrence College in 1942╨1945 and conducted research on isotopes for the atomic bomb project. After the war Mayer╒s interests centered increasingly in nuclear physics, and in 1946 she became a senior physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory and volunteer professor of physics in the Enrico Fermi Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago. She received a regular appointment as full professor in 1959. In 1948╨1949 she published several papers concerning the stability and configuration of protons and neutrons that comprise the atomic nucleus. She developed a theory that the nucleus consists of several shells or orbital levels, and that the distribution of protons and neutrons among these shells produces the characteristic degree of stability of each species of nucleus. A similar theory was developed at the same time in Germany by Johannes H. D. Jensen, with whom she subsequently collaborated on Elementary Theory of Nuclear Shell Structure, 1955. The work established her as a leading authority in the field, and in 1963 she and Jensen and Eugene P. Wigner of Princeton shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for their theoretical contributions. Also noted for her work in quantum electrodynamics and spectroscopy, Mayer accepted an appointment at the University of California at San Diego in 1960, as did her husband. She died in San Diego on February 20, 1972. ╓styl `
