Maria Goeppert Mayer

Mayer was born in Katowitz, Poland, then part of Germany.
She won the Nobel Prize in Physics in1963 for her discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure
For most of her career, Mayer worked without pay or a tenured position, in her own words, “just for the fun of doing physics."
During World War II, her expertise was recognised and utilised by the US government for their atom bomb project, again mostly unpaid
Mayer said, “Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man”.

Text: The Nobel Prize (Accessed 18 February 2020) and The Nobel Prize | Women Who Changed Science (Accessed 12 March 2020)

Author: Efe Otobrise (2020) LJMU Student

Cookie settings