The Nobel Prize in Physics 1963
Awarded on: 1963-11-05
"for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure"
Affiliations:
- University of California – San Diego, CA, USA
Maria Goeppert Mayer
Born: 1906-06-28 in Kattowitz, Germany (now Katowice, Poland)
Gender: female
Field: German–American theoretical physicist (1906–1972)
Biography
Maria Goeppert-Mayer was a German–American theoretical physicist whose work on the structure of the atomic nucleus led to the development of the nuclear shell model. For this discovery she shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics with J. Hans D. Jensen, while the other half of the prize was awarded to Eugene Wigner. She was the second woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics, after Marie Curie in 1903.