Post by The Nobel Prize

Maria Goeppert Mayer was born on this day 120 years ago. As the only child of a sixth-generation academic, she was expected to go to university. “My father said, ‘Don’t grow up to be a woman,’ and what he meant by that was, a housewife.” But in Göttingen, Germany, in the early 1900s, girls didn’t have many educational options. The one school for girls closed a year before Goeppert Mayer was due to graduate. She passed the university entrance exam along with only four other girls. When she enrolled in university in 1924, fewer than one in ten German university students was female. The University of Göttingen was a centre of modern physics in the 1920s, with faculty such as Max Born and Werner Heisenberg. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi were among the students. Goeppert Mayer had intended to study math, but could not resist the lure of physics. She was awarded her doctorate in 1930.