From 1901 to the present day ... three women have won the Nobel Prize in Physics

Maria Goeppertmayer

Of Germanic origin, she was in USA nationalized. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1963, for her studies on the structure of atomic nuclei.

She studied Mathematics at the University of Göttingen. After finishing her studies, attended a conference in 1927 that attracted her interest to the field of incipient quantum physics, entering to work on the atomic spectra under the direction of Max Born. In 1930, she married with Joseph Mayer, the USA nacionality. She moved to her husband's country and entered to work at John Hopkins University. There, Maria Goeppert-Mayer got a job of very low category with "one of the only two people who would work in the center with a woman", her own husband. Her work on molecular spectra attracted the attention of Fermi, who invited the spouses to join him at Columbia University, only offered a remunerated position to Joseph Mayer. Maria Goeppert-Mayer continued to investigate, as "unpaid volunteer" with the spectra of atoms heavier than Uranium, which had just been discovered. She got a certain prestige. Led, at the beginning of World War II, a team of fifteen scientists. With this team she elaborated a method of obtaining the isotope 235U from uranium haxafluoride.

In 1945, they moved again to collaborate with Fermi at the Institute of Nuclear Studies, in Chicago, where, again, she received no compensation. She was fifty-three years old and had not yet received a salary or been recognized as a teacher. She investigated the nuclear structures and experimentally found the sequence of magic numbers or number of nucleons that are part of the particularly stable atomic nuclei (2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, 126), which led her to elaborate, in 1950, the nuclear theory of layers. Her theory also allows knowing that certain transuranic elements not yet discovered will be much more stable than their neighbors, depending on the number of nucleons they have.

Subsequently, she moved to the University of La Jolla, in California. In 1963, she won the Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Eugen Wigner and Hans Jensen, who had developed the same theory on his own. Wigner was awarded for developing a theory that explained the proton/neutron interaction. Maria Goeppert Mayer died in San Diego, California, in 1972.

_{Donna Strickland}

She was born in 1959, in Guelph, Canada. She studied Physics at the McMaster University, Canada and obtained a Doctorate in Optics from the University of Rochester in the United States. From 1991 to 1992 she worked in the Laser Division of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, doing an outstanding job in research. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo.

The research for which she has been recognized this year, has origin, is part of her Doctoral Thesis, 30 years ago, which she did together with Gerard Mourou. The fundamental part of her research was to stretch laser pulses in time, amplify and finally compress them. With that they discovered that if a pulse of light is compressed in time and shortened, then there is more light concentrated in a reduced space, so the intensity of the pulse increases significantly.

In 1998, she was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Research Prize. In 1999, with the Premier's Research Excellence Award. In 2000, she received the Cottrell Scholars Award from the Research Corporation and in 2008 she was a member of the American Optical Society.

Donna Strickland shares the Nobel Prize in Physics with Frenchman Gerard Mourou for research related to "her method to generate the shortest and most intense laser pulses created by humanity". The other winner, on this occasion, was the USA research Arthur Ashkin, who was recognized for the development of "optical tweezers" and their application to biological systems_(Source).