"Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man."
As the only child of a sixth-generation academic, Maria Goeppert Mayer was expected to go to university. “My father said, ‘Don’t grow up to be a woman,’ and what he meant by that was, a housewife.”
But in Göttingen, Germany, in the early 1900s, girls didn’t have many educational options. The one school for girls closed a year before Goeppert Mayer was due to graduate. She took the university entrance exam anyway – and passed – along with just four other girls.
When she enrolled in university in 1924, fewer than one in ten German university students was female.
The University of Göttingen was a centre of modern physics in the 1920s, with faculty such as Max Born and Werner Heisenberg. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi were among the students. Goeppert Mayer had intended to study math, but could not resist the lure of physics. She was awarded her doctorate in 1930.
Learn more about physics laureate Maria Goeppert Mayer: https://bit.ly/2WZYShD