Mayer’s began her pioneering work by noticing a correlation between how abundant different chemical elements are in nature and the particular numbers of neutrons and protons in their nuclei.
It’s been more than 50 years since there was a female winner. Maria Goeppert Mayer, is the last woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 after she discovered that the nucleus of the atom has an onion like layered structure. Elizabeth Landau writes that since then many other women have been widely considered worthy, too: Vera Rubin, who died last year, was regarded as a strong candidate for uncovering the existence of dark matter. Jocelyn Bell Burnell played a major role in discovering pulsars but was left off the relevant 1974 Nobel Prize snagged by her (male) graduate advisor. In 2014 Slatepublished a longer list of women contenders. But to date, Mayer and Marie Curie are the only women who have been named for this particular prestigious prize. Read more
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