A Life of Dedication - Maria Goeppert Mayer
Born June 28, 1906, in Kattowitz, Upper Silesia, which was then Germany and is now Poland, Maria Goeppert was the daughter of Friedrich and Maria Goeppert. Her father was a professor of Pediatrics, and she grew up hearing that he was the sixth generation of university professors in the family. Her studies were encouraged by her family, but not by society.
There were no public schools that prepared girls for university admission tests, so the family enrolled Maria is Frauenstudium, a preparatory school run by women. The university atmosphere of her home life, and the example of her father, combined with an early love of mathematics to make Maria an extremely capable student. The school closed unexpectedly before Maria completed the three years of study normally required for success on the examination, but she took the test anyway, passed, and in 1924 was admitted to Georgia Augusta University, commonly known as Goettingen.
Maria became a student of Max Born who introduced her to quantum mechanics and physics. Goettingen was an international center for the study of quantum mechanics and she met many of the great minds of the time. Her studies provided her with both a mathematical and nonmathematical approach to physics. She received her doctorate in 1930.
Born and the many scientists she met and worked with over the years became friends. The groups would form and re-form at universities and laboratories throughout the years of her life. The relationships would blend work and social events, and they would influence her research and her life as much as she influenced theirs.
After earning her degree, she married Joseph Mayer, and they moved to Baltimore, where he had accepted an appointment in the Chemistry Department of Johns Hopkins University. The depression had begun, and jobs were scarce at best. Johns Hopkins had a rule against nepotism, and Maria was unable to find a full time paying job. She became an assistant in the Physics department and was encouraged by the faculty to continue her research and studies. She found friends and colleagues in Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics. Her background in quantum mechanics served her well as she studied the structure of organic compounds. She left Johns Hopkins in 1939 when her husband accepted a position at Columbia.
Although she had published several scholarly articles and co-authored a book by this time, Columbia did not offer her a position, but they did provide her office space. She became reacquainted with Enrico Fermi, whom she had met several years earlier, and she assisted him in predicting the theoretical valence-shell structure of transuranium elements. Her theory proved quite accurate when the new chemical was discovered.
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