Maria Goeppert Mayer By: Miranda Reynolds

Birth Born June 28 th, 1906 Kattowitz, Upper Silesia, then Germany Parents: Friedrich Goeppert and Maria Only Child

On her father's side she is the 7th straight generation of university professors. In the spring of 1924 she enrolled at the University at Göttingen More attracted to physics Than becoming a mathematician

Deeply indebted to Max Born. took her doctorate in 1930 in theoretical physics

Karl F. Herzfeld took an interest in her work she slowly developed into a chemical physicist She wrote many papers with Herzfeld and her husband

she started to work on the color of organic molecules 1939, Maria and her husband went to Columbia Maria taught 1 year at Sarah Lawrence College.

Maria mainly worked at the S.A.M laboratory on the separation of isotopes of uranium, with Harold Urey In 1946 Maria and her husband went to Chicago first place where she was not considered a nuisance

Maria was suddenly a Professor in the Physics Department and in the Institute for Nuclear Studies also employed by the Argonne National Laboratory very little knowledge of Nuclear Physics

In 1948 she started to work on the magic numbers took her another year to find their explanation and several years to work out most of the consequences

In 1960 they came to La Jolla Maria Goeppert Mayer is a professor of physics member of the National Academy of Sciences

Also a member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Heidelberg has received honorary degrees of Doctor of Science from Russel Sage College Mount Holyoke College and Smith College.

Maria and her husband have two children both born in Baltimore Maria Ann Wentzel, now in Ann Arbor and a son, Peter Conrad, a graduate student of economics in Berkeley.

Works Cited aureates/1963/mayer-bio.htmlhttp://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/l aureates/1963/mayer-bio.html