A Life of Dedication - Maria Goeppert Mayer

In December of 1941, she accepted a half time teaching job at nearby Sarah Lawrence College. She accepted a second part time job in 1942 with Harold Urey at Columbia University's Substitute Alloy Materials Project (SAM). She also worked on the Opacity Project at Columbia. The work produced by both the SAM and Opacity projects led to the development of thermonuclear weapons used in World War II.

In February of 1946, the Mayers moved to Chicago. Her husband became a Professor in both the Chemistry department and the Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University. Again, nepotism rules prohibited Maria from obtaining a paid position. So, Maria "volunteered" in the Physics department. At the same time, the Opacity Project moved to the University of Chicago, and Maria continued working on that project. On July 1, 1946, this project and the laboratory that housed it became the Argonne National Laboratory, created by the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission. Maria became a Senior Physicist (half time). At Argonne, she worked on peace time uses for nuclear energy and was the first person to use a computer (ENIAC) to work on the criticality problem for a liquid metal breeder reactor. She also continued work at the University of Chicago, including their Institute for Nuclear Studies (now called the Enrico Fermi Institute). The intellectual and research environment at the Institute encompassed many of the fields where Maria had worked. Edward Teller encouraged her to work with him on a model of the origin of the elements. Her research led her to note a regularity in the specific number of neutrons in nuclei. These specific numbers became known as "magic numbers". She was encouraged by her continued research findings and by conversations with Fermi who was also at the Institute. A chance question by Fermi led her directly to the concept of the spin orbit coupling shell model of nuclei. Her findings were published one month after the same conclusions were drawn from the work of Otto Hazel, J Hans D Jensen, and Hans E Suess. 

Mayer and Jensen would later meet and begin a collaborative effort to further investigate the model. It was this shared effort that produced the book, Elementary Theory of Nuclear Shell Structure in 1955, and they would later share the Nobel Prize in 1963 for their contributions.

In 1960, at age 54, Maria Goeppert Mayer accepted a full professorship at the University of California in San Diego. Internationally recognized in her field, and finally working in a full time university capacity, she became the seventh generation of professors in her family.

She suffered a stroke soon after

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