Maria Goeppert-Mayer
Maria Goeppert- Mayer ( born June 28, 1906 in Katowice, Silesia, † February 20, 1972 in San Diego, California ) was a German -American physicist. She was the second and so far the last woman to receive the Nobel Prize for physics.
Life
Goeppert- Mayer was born in 1906 as the only child of the later pediatrics professor Friedrich Goeppert ( 1870-1927 ) and his wife, a teacher of languages and music Maria Goeppert. Her grandfather was the law professor Robert Heinrich Goeppert (1838-1882), a great-grandfather of botany professor Heinrich Goeppert and a great-great grandfather already professor of pharmacy. With her parents she moved to Göttingen in 1910. For their parents, it was natural that they would study after high school in 1924. First Goeppert- Mayer wanted to become a mathematician, but then changed after three years in the physics. In 1930 she received her doctorate " About elementary file with two quantum jumps " in the later Nobel laureate Max Born. How scientifically significant the University of Göttingen was at that time, was also in mind that even James Franck, and Adolf Windaus were present at her viva. She married the Franck- employee Joseph Edward Mayer (1904-1983), who later became President of the American Physical Society, and went with him in 1930 in the United States. The couple had two children. She taught - during the time of the Great Depression, no one wanted to pay the wife of a professor - free of charge at the Johns Hopkins University (1930-1939) and at Columbia University (1939-1946) and published, together with her husband in 1940, the book " Statistical Mechanics ". In the 30 years she worked closely with Karl Herzfeld. Even when nuclear weapons program, she worked with. It was not until 1946 she was a full professor at the University of Chicago Argonne National Laboratory. In 1950 she was elected a corresponding member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. From 1960, she had a chair of physics at the University of California.
Services
She found in 1949 on the initiative of Enrico Fermi, the explanation for the magic numbers whose meaning was known for some time for the stability of atomic nuclei in the strong spin -orbit coupling. At the same time and completely independently also found J. Hans D. Jensen the solution. Together they wrote the 1955 book " Elementary theory of nuclear shell structure" on their theory.
Goeppert- Mayer was divided in 1963 with J. Hans D. Jensen, one half of the Nobel Prize in Physics " for their discovery of nuclear shell structure ", the other half went to Eugene Paul Wigner.
Honorable remembrance
Maria Goeppert -Mayer ( MGM) Professorships for strengthening gender research at universities in Lower Saxony - with emphasis on the development of international (research) relationships - are sponsored by the Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and Culture under which Maria- Goeppert- Mayer- program.
Also according to Goeppert- Mayer in late 2010 was named a street in Braunschweig.
Works
- Joseph Edward Mayer Statistical Mechanics, Wiley 1940
Literature on Maria Goeppert- Mayer
- Daniela Wuensch: The last Nobel Prize in physics for a woman? Maria Goeppert Mayer: A goddess Gerin conquered the atomic nuclei. Nobel Prize in 1963. 's 50th anniversary. Termessos Verlag Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-938016-15-2 (148 pp., 44 photos, 2 diagrams ).
- Judith smoke: Never become a woman, if you're tall. In: Charlotte Kerner: Not only Madame Curie - women who received the Nobel Prize. Beltz Verlag Weinheim and Basel 1999, ISBN 3-407-80862-3