Maria Goeppert-Mayer was born in Germany and received a PhD in physics from GÖttingen University. Her thesis work, which dealt with quantum mechanical effects in atoms, was encouraged by Paul Ehrenfest. She moved to the United States in 1930 after her husband received a professorship in chemistry at Johns Hopkins University. While at home raising two children, she wrote a book with her husband on statistical mechanics. Following the publication of the book she was offered a lectureship in chemistry at Johns Hopkins University, but her presence as a woman at faculty functions was awkward.
In the late 1940s she and her husband received appointments at the University of Chicago, but her position was without pay because of a strict nepotism rule. While in Chicago, she worked with Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller. During her collaboration with Teller, she became interested in why certain elements in the periodic table were so abundant and stable. She eventually realized that the most stable elements were characterized by particular values of atomic and neutron numbers, which she called "magic numbers." She labored over a theoretical explanation of these numbers for about one year, and finally arrived at a solution during a conversation with Fermi. This resulted in a 1950 publication in which she described the "shell" model of the nucleus. (It is interesting to note that the paper confused many Russian scientists, who translated "shell" as "grenade.") As often happens in scientific research, a similar model was simultaneously developed by Hans Jensen, a German scientist. Maria Goeppert-Mayer and Hans Jensen were awarded the Nobel prize in physics in 1963 for their extraordinary work in understanding the structure of the nucleus. When Goeppert-Mayer heard that she had won the Nobel Prize, she said "Oh, how wonderful, I’ve always wanted to meet a king."