Joseph Mayer and Maria Goeppert-Mayer, 1930. Joseph (1904-1983), a physical chemist, met theoretical physicist Maria Goeppert (1906-1972) at the University of Gottingen, Germany. They married in 1930 and moved to the USA, where they worked at Johns Hopkins University, together writing a textbook called Statistical Mechanics. After the Second World War they moved to the University of Chicago, where they were appointed as professors of physics. Maria Goeppert-Mayer won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1963 for her contribution to the Nuclear Shell Model.