Joseph Edward Mayer (1904-1983)
Joseph Mayer was born on February 5, 1904, in New York City. His father, an expatriate Austrian, was a civil engineer with an avid interest in science. His family later moved to Canada and then to California, where Mayer graduated from Hollywood High School. In 1924 he received a B.S. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. He went on to the University of California at Berkeley and earned his doctorate there in 1927 under the direction of Gilbert N. Lewis.
After graduation, Mayer spent a year of postdoctoral work at Berkeley as an assistant to Lewis. Between 1929 and 1930, as a Rockefeller International Education Board fellow, he studied under James Franck at Gottingen, Germany, carrying out research on virial expansion. There he met Maria Goeppert, a doctoral student studying physics under Max Born. Mayer and Goeppert were married in the spring of 1930.
To describe his Berkeley period, we can quote from Joseph's own sketch: "I can imagine no milieu more beneficial to the development of a graduate student than that department at that time. The atmosphere was that of unravelling the intricacies of nature in one of its important aspects. Pure knowledge of an assortment of unconnected facts was seldom emphasized, but a deep understanding of principles and originality in interpretation were most admired."
In view of his later reputation as a theorist, it is interesting that Joseph's first research was experimental. The 1927 publication from his thesis with G. N. Lewis was titled, A Disproof of the Radiation Theory of Chemical Activation. This showed that there was no experimental evidence that exposure of a molecular beam of pinene to a beam of infra-red radiation caused a chemical reaction, racemization of the pinene, in contradiction to a hypothesis popular at the time. Settling this question was important for the development of a correct theory of chemical reactions. However, it was at Berkeley that Joseph's first work on chemical theory was done; this effort was in collaboration with G. N. Lewis on the relation between quantum statistical mechanics and thermodynamics.
Returning to the United States, Mayer took a position as associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he taught until 1939.In 1929 Joseph was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship and went to Gottingen, Germany, to work with James Franck, Nobel Laureate in Physics in 1925. Gottingen then was known as the source of the new quantum theory, developed there by Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and Born.Joseph worked with Born on the theory of ionic crystals, a collaboration that was interrupted for a year while he returned to the United States to take up a position in the Chemistry Department at Johns Hopkins.
On a return visit to Gottingen in 1931, Mayer worked on lattice energy theory in corroboration with Max Born and Lindsay Helmhotz. At Johns Hopkins, Mayer's research focused on the theoretical versus the experimental side of chemistry. From 1939 to 1946 he worked at Columbia University in New York City, where he took over from Harold C. Urey the editorship (1940-1953) of the Journal of Chemical Physics. In 1940, Joseph and Maria Mayer jointly published Statistical Mechanics, one of the first textbooks in the field.
At Gottingen Joseph met Maria Goppert, a student of Born's. They were married in 1930, just before going to America. The Mayers had two children, Marianna and Peter. At Johns Hopkins they collaborated on a textbook of statistical mechanics, published in 1940, which has been known to generations of graduate students simply as "Mayer and Mayer." Much later Maria received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of the shell theory of the atomic nucleus.
Maria Mayer died in 1972 after a long illness. That year Joseph Mayer married Margaret Griffin. Retiring the following year, he became a UCSD professor emeritus and continued to maintain an office on campus. Freed from academic responsibilities, he accepted the presidency of the American Physical Society in 1973 and actively attended conferences. He produced a second edition of Statistical Mechanics in 1977, and continued to write until his death on October 15, 1983.
The development of Joseph's scientific work followed a pattern. In the Johns Hopkins and Columbia years he ran an experimental program measuring various thermodynamic properties of alkali halide crystals and vapors. One of us (BHZ) prepared a thesis on the vapor pressures of these crystals under his direction at Columbia. With the move to Chicago, however, he found setting up a laboratory again to be too much of an investment of time and energy, and he terminated this experimental work. At Johns Hopkins he wrote, in collaboration with several students, an epoch-making series of papers on the equilibrium statistical mechanics of imperfect gases. These introduced methods based on graphs, now known as Mayer graphs, for evaluating the highly complex coefficients of the virial series for the various thermodynamic properties. Continuing this work at Columbia with W. G. McMillan, he extended the methods to liquid solutions; the resulting McMillan-Mayer solution theory has served as the rigorous basis for much later work. At Chicago he extended the methods further to ionic solutions, where the long-ranged Coulomb interaction potentials forced a regrouping of the terms of the various series. This paper created the first thoroughly rigorous foundation of the ionic-solution theory originally put forward by Debye and Huckel in the 1920s, and in addition showed how to make practically useful extensions into the difficult but important range of concentrated salt solutions. These cited items are only the most prominent of his many research activities.
Three of Joseph's former students or post-doctoral associates are now members of the faculty of the University: M. Baur and W. G. McMillan at UCLA, and B. H. Zimm at UCSD.
In addition to his research and teaching career, Joseph Mayer was active in public service. He was a consultant during World War II at the Ballistics Research Laboratories, Aberdeen Proving Ground, of the U.S. Army. In this connection he was at the front lines of Iwo Jima during the battle there. Afterwards he was for many years a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Laboratories. He was editor of the Journal of Chemical Physics from 1941 to 1952. He was chairman of the Commission of Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry from 1955 to 1967. He was a member of the Scientific Council of the Solvay Foundation of Brussels from 1961 on. He was vice president of the American Physical Society in 1972-73, becoming president in 1973-74. At UCSD he was chairman of the Chemistry Department from 1963 to 1966, at which time the department, first formed only three years before, was in a critical early stage of growth.
Joseph Mayer had an unbridled curiosity and interest in the world around him. He thoroughly liked to laugh. He knew much about the world. He had a sure wisdom. Those who knew him were constantly rewarded by the clarity of his thought. Most significant, possibly, was his ability to listen so intently to others. Indeed, Joseph Mayer was a contributor of the very best sort.
Mayer maintained an active membership in national organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Among numerous awards, he received the Gilbert N. Lewis Medal (1958), the Charles Frederick Chandler Medal (1966), the Peter Debye Award in Physical Chemistry (1967), and the John G. Kirkwood Medal (1967).