Maria Goeppert Mayer explained to kids

Maria Goeppert Mayer was a German-American physicist and mathematician who made important contributions to the fields of quantum mechanics and nuclear physics. She was born in 1906 in Kattowitz, Germany (now Poland), and grew up in Göttingen, Germany. She studied physics at the University of Göttingen and earned her Ph.D. in 1930. In 1931, she married Joseph E. Mayer, a chemist, and the two moved to the United States. They had two children. Maria Goeppert Mayer began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in 1943 and continued until 1949. In 1946, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In the early 1950s, Goeppert Mayer developed a model of the nucleus of an atom that explained the behavior of certain types of radioactive decay. This model, which is now known as the "shell model," earned her the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963. Goeppert Mayer was also the first woman to be appointed as a full professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She held this position from 1957 until her retirement in 1971. Maria Goeppert Mayer died in 1972 at the age of 66.