uranium 238.
This was the first step in the development of the atomic bomb.
Maria was born in what used to be Germany, but is now Katowice, Poland in 1906. She attended Göttingen University
which was the center for the development of modern and theoretical physics. Scientists should have been banging on her
door, but because she was a female they did not. To make matters worse the favoritism rule (called nepotism) kept the
physics department from giving her a job because her husband taught there. This did not stop her though, she researched
without pay and made some startling discoveries on organic compounds that are still in use today in chemical journals.
She co-authored a famous textbook with her husband, Statistical Mechanisms, that is about statistical mathematics. She
finally became employed as a teacher at Sarah Lawrence College, and acquired a position with the Manhattan Project on
an aspect called Substitute Alloy Minerals. The organization was secret and Maria's job was to separate uranium 235 from
uranium 238.
This was the first step in the development of the atomic bomb.
Maria and her husband went to work at the University of Chicago. She became an associate professor of physics, but she could not be paid because of the nepotism rule. She became a paid senior physicist at the Agoone National Laboratory. She researched and wrote a thesis on the "shell-model". Her work has been called "ground breaking." She discovered that atomic nuclei have shells that are similar to the electron shells of atoms. All the particles moving in the same orbit rotate in the same direction. Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Dr. Hans Jensen, and Dr. Eugene Wigner received the Nobel Prize in 1963 in Physics.
