Autobiography

I was born on June 28, 1906 in Kattowitz, Upper Silesia, then Germany, the only child of Friedrich Goeppert and his wife Maria, nee Wolff. On my father's side, I am the seventh straight generation of university professors.

In 1910 my father went as Professor of Pediatrics to Gottingen where I spent most of my life until my marriage. I went to private and public schools in Gottingen and had the great fortune to have very good teachers. It somehow was never discussed, but taken for granted by my parents as well as by me that I would go to the University. Yet, at that time it was not trivially easy for a woman to do so. In Gottingen there was only a privately endowed school which prepared girls for the "abitur", the entrance examination for the university. This school closed its doors during the inflation, but our teachers continued instructing us. I finally took the abitur examination in Hannover in 1924, being examined by teachers I had never seen in my life.

In the spring of 1924 I enrolled at the University at Gottingen, with the intention of becoming a mathematician. But soon I found myself more attracted to physics. This was the time when quantum mechanics was young and exciting.

Except for one term which I spent in Cambridge, England, where my greatest profit was to learn English, my entire university career took place in Gottingen. I am deeply indebted to Max Born, for his kind guidance of my scientific education. I took my doctorate in 1930 in theoretical physics. There were three Nobel prize winners on my doctoral committee, Born, Franck and Windaus.

Shortly before I had met Joseph Edward Mayer, an American Rockefeller fellow working with James Franck. In 1930 I went with him to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. This was the time of the depres­sion, and no university would think of employing the wife of a profes­sor. But I kept working, just for the fun of doing physics.

Karl F. Herzfeld took an interest in my work, and under his influence and that of my husband, I slowly developed into a chemical physicist.

I wrote various papers with Herzfeld and with my husband, and started to work on the color of organic molecules.

In 1939 we went to Columbia. I taught one year at Sarah Lawrence College, but mainly I worked at the S. A. M. Laboratory, dedicated to the separation of isotopes of uranium, with Harold Urey as director. Urey usually assigned me not to the main line of research of the laboratory, but to side issues, for instance, to the investigation of the possibility of separating isotopes by photochemical reactions. This was nice, clean physics although it did not help in the separation of isotopes.

In 1946 we went to Chicago. This was the first place where I was not considered a nuisance, but greeted with open arms. I was suddenly a Professor in the physics department and in the Institute for Nuclear Studies. I was also employed by the Argonne National Laboratory with very little knowledge of Nuclear Physics! It took me some time to find my way in this, for me, new field. But in the atmosphere of Chicago, it was rather easy to learn nuclear physics. I owe a great deal to very many discussions with Edward Teller, and in particular with Enrico Fermi, who was always patient and helpful.

In 1948 I started to work on the magic numbers, but it took me an­other year to find their explanation, and several years to work out most of the consequences. That Haxel, Jensen and Suess, whom I had never met, gave the same explanation at the same time helped to convince me that it was right. I met Jensen in 1950. A few years later the compe­titors from both sides of the Atlantic decided to write a book together.

In 1960 we came to La Jolla where I am professor of physics. I am a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a corresponding mem­ber of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Heidelberg. I have received honorary degrees of Doctor of Science from Russel Sage College, Mount Holyoke College and Smith College.

We have two children, both born in Baltimore, Maria Ann Wentzel, now in Ann Arbor, and a son, Peter Conrad, a graduate student of economics in Berkeley.

From Les Prix Nobel en 1963, Editor Göran Liljestrand, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1964

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

 

Maria Goeppert-Mayer died on February 20, 1972.

 

Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1963