Mayer, Maria Goeppert, << MY uhr, mah REE ah GOH puhrt >> (1906-1972), a German-born physicist, shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in physics with J. Hans Jensen of Germany and Eugene Paul Wigner of the United States. Mayer and Jensen, working independently, prepared almost identical papers on the shell structure of atomic nuclei. They discovered that atomic nuclei possess shells similar to the electron shells of atoms. These shells contain varying numbers of protons and neutrons, which permits systematic arrangement of nuclei according to their properties. Maria Goeppert was born in Kattowitz, Germany (now Katowice, Poland), on June 28, 1906. She married Joseph E. Mayer, an American chemist, in 1930, and moved to the United States. In 1960, they both joined the faculty of the University of California, San Diego. Maria Mayer died on Feb. 20, 1972.
