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Maria Goeppert Mayer

Physics

Maria Goeppert Mayer was a German-American theoretical physicist. She developed the nuclear shell model, which explains why atomic nuclei with certain numbers of protons or neutrons are especially stable. She shared one half of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics with J. Hans D. Jensen for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure, with Eugene Wigner receiving the other half for separate work. She was the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, after Marie Curie in 1903.

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Maria Goeppert Mayer (Wikipedia)
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