In the fall of 1963, a San Diego newspaper announced the news in bold print: "S.D. Mother Wins Nobel Prize." What the headline failed to mention was that this mother had just decoded the structure of the atomic nucleus, and that she had spent the previous 30 years doing paradigm-shifting physics completely for free, because the American academic establishment refused to put her on the payroll. Maria Goeppert Mayer was only the second woman in history to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.

This episode traces her path from Göttingen, the Silicon Valley of quantum mechanics, where a suffragette-run school sent battle-tested girls past an entrance exam most boys failed, through a 1931 doctoral thesis on two-photon absorption so far ahead of its time that the laser had to be invented to confirm it. It follows the decades of unpaid "volunteer" positions, the magic numbers she explained with a nuclear shell model, and the long-overdue professorship at UCSD that finally came three years before the prize.

• The sixth-generation academic family and the father she called "more interesting, he was, after all, a scientist"
• The suffragette school exam: all the girls passed, one of thirty boys did
• A thesis ahead of its instruments: two-photon absorption and the unit now called the GM
• Magic numbers and the quantum waltz: the shell model that won the Nobel from an unpaid desk
• The legacy: an APS award for young women in physics, Mayer Hall, a postage stamp, and a crater on Venus