Physicist dead

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32848, 23 February 1972, Page 17

Physicist dead

(N.Z.PA-R«uter— Copyright) SAN DIEGO (California),

February 22. A physicist, Dr Maria Goeppert Mayer, aged 65, the second woman to win a Nobel Prize for physics, died of heart failure yesterday, in a hospital in San Diego, it was announced today. Dr Mayer, prqfessor of physics at the University of California in San Diego, shared the Nobel Prize in 1963 for her work in explaining the way in which nuclei absorb neutrons in highenergy physics. The previous woman winner was Marie Curie, honoured in 1903 for her discovery of radium. Dr Mayer was bom in 1906 at what is now Katowice, Poland, then part of Germany, and earned her doctorate at the University of Gottingen. She married Dr Joseph Mayer, then an American student in Germany, and they returned to the United States in 1930 and joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University. She also taught at the University of Chicago, where she worked with Enrico Fermi. She leaves her husband, a chemistry professor at the university in San Diego, a son, Peter, and a daughter, Mrs Donat Wentzel.