biography
| name: |
Goeppert-Mayer, Maria
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| |
née Goepert
|
pronunciation:
[goepert mayer]
| sex:
| female
|
| lived:
| (1906–72)
|
| biography:
| Physicist, born in Katowice, Poland (formerly Kattowitz, Germany). She married American chemical physicist Joseph Mayer, and accompanied him to Johns Hopkins (1930–9). The couple moved to Columbia University (1939–45), where she separated uranium isotopes for the Manhattan Project. At the University of Chicago (1946–60) she developed her concentric shell theory of the atomic nucleus, with each completed shell having its own ‘magic number’ of protons and neutrons. For this contribution, she and colleague J Hans D Jensen shared the 1963 Nobel Prize for Physics. She continued her research at the University of California, San Diego (1960–72), even after being partially incapacitated by a stroke. |
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