Maria Goeppert Mayer

MARIA GOEPPERT MAYER d1972. German-born American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. She was the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, the first being Marie Curie. After the war, she became a voluntary associate professor of Physics at the University of Chicago (where her husband and Teller worked) and a senior physicist at the university-run Argonne National Laboratory. She developed a mathematical model for the structure of nuclear shells, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 which she shared with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Wigner. In 1986, the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award for early-career women physicists was established in her honor. She died in California aged 65 on February 20th 1972