Maria Goeppert-Mayer

born June 28, 1906, died February 20, 1972

When Polish-born physicist Maria Goeppert-Mayer won the Nobel
Prize for physics in 1963 (shared with J.H.D. Jensen and Eugene
Wigner), she became only the second U.S. woman ever to win a Nobel
prize, and the first U.S. woman to do so in physics. Her work promoted the
theory that the stability of atomic nuclei is due to the arrangement
of the protons and neutrons in relatively fixed shells or orbits.
Goeppert-Mayer earned her degree in physics from the University of
Gottingen in Germany, and worked at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore,
Maryland after she moved to the United States. In 1946, she joined the
faculty of the University of Chicago. She achieved the rank of full 
professor in 1959.