Maria Goeppert Mayer

Maria Goeppert came out of Göttingen with a doctoral thesis on two-photon absorption, a phenomenon so remote from experiment that it waited for the laser age to be verified; the unit of measure now carries her name. She married chemist Joseph Edward Mayer and followed him to Johns Hopkins, where nepotism rules barred her from faculty rank but not from publishing a landmark paper on double beta decay in 1935. Columbia gave her an unpaid position; the war gave her Manhattan Project work on isotope separation and a stint at Los Alamos on thermonuclear weapons with Edward Teller. After 1945 she landed at the University of Chicago as a voluntary associate professor and senior physicist at Argonne, where she built the mathematical model of nuclear shell structure that earned her the Nobel in 1963, shared with J. Hans D. Jensen. She became a full professor at UC San Diego in 1960, two decades into a career spent working around the edges of institutions that wouldn't quite let her in.