Maria Goeppert Mayer

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Maria Goeppert Mayer (German: [maˈʁiːa ˈɡœpɐt ˈmaɪɐ] ; née Göppert; June 28, 1906 – February 20, 1972) was a German–American theoretical physicist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Wigner. One half of the prize was awarded jointly to Goeppert Mayer and Jensen "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure." She was the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, the first being Marie Curie in 1903. In 1986, the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award for early-career women physicists was established in her honor. A graduate of the University of Göttingen, Goeppert Mayer wrote her doctoral thesis on the theory of possible two-photon absorption by atoms. At the time, the chances of experimentally verifying her thesis seemed remote, but the development of the laser in the 1960s later permitted this. Today, the unit for the two-photon absorption cross section is called the Goeppert Mayer (GM) unit. Maria Goeppert married American chemist Joseph Edward...

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