Maria Goeppert Mayer (June 28, 1906 – February 20, 1972) was a Germanborn American theoretical physicist, and Nobel laureate in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. She was the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, after Marie Curie.

    A graduate of the University of Göttingen, Goeppert Mayer wrote her doctoral thesis on the theory of possible two-photon absorption by atoms. At the time, the chances of experimentally verifying her thesis seemed remote, but the development of the laser permitted this. Today, the unit for the two-photon absorption cross section is named the Goeppert Mayer (GM) unit.

Early life

   Maria Göppert was born on June 28, 1906, in Kattowitz (now Katowice, Poland), a city in Prussia, the only child of Friedrich Göppert and his wife Maria née Wolff. In 1910, she moved with her family to Göttingen when her father, a....