Special Women to Have Won the Nobel Prize with Their Remarkable Contributions

Maria Goeppert Mayer

Although she was born in Germany, Maria Goeppert Mayer moved to America after getting married to Joseph Edward Mayer. The theoretical physicist then started working on an atom bomb project during World War II. She laid bare critical discoveries in nuclear structure and proposed a nuclear shell prototyple of the atomic nucleus.

Mayer’s work would earn her a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963, making her the second woman to attain such an award and one of the four women to become Nobel laureates in that field. She wrote a doctoral thesis at the University of Göttingen about the possibility of two-photon absorption by atoms.

More in Trending

You must be logged in to post a comment Login