Joseph Edward Mayer (February 5, 1904, New York City – October 15, 1983) was a chemist who has formulated the Mayer expansion in statistical field theory.

He was professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego from 1960 to 1973. He was married to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer from 1930 until her death in 1972. He went to work with James Franck in Göttingen, Germany in 1929, where he met Maria, a student of Max Born. Joseph Mayer was president of the American Physical Society from 1973 to 1975.

He developed the cluster expansion method and Mayer-McMillan solution theory.
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Joseph Edward Mayer, one of the six initial members of the UCSD Chemistry Department, was a distinguished chemist, particularly renowned for work in the theory of statistical mechanics. Among many awards and honors, he had received the G. N. Lewis Medal (1958), the Peter Debye Award (1967) and the James Flack Norris Award (1969) from the American Chemical Society, the Chandler Medal (1966) from Columbia University, and the J. G. Kirkwood Medal from Yale (1967). He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1946. He received an honorary Sc.D. from Brussels in 1962. In his professional career, he was successively a member of the faculties of Johns Hopkins (1937-39), Columbia (1939-45), Chicago (1945-60), and UCSD (1960-72, emeritus 1972-83).

Joe 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. Encouraged by his home background and also by an excellent high school teacher, in 1921 he entered the California Institute of Technology to study chemistry.

Joe wrote an informative and amusing autobiographical sketch of the first part of his life entitled, "The Way It Was" ; this article was published in Annual Review of Physical Chemistry in 1982, volume 33, pages 1-23. Much of the following material is taken from it.

At Cal Tech he was in contact with R. C. Tolman, A. A. Noyes, and R. Dickinson of the chemistry faculty, who were all first-class scientists, and with graduate students Paul Emmett and Linus Pauling, who were soon to become famous as scientists themselves. Joe worked for Dickinson as an undergraduate assistant while Pauling was starting his graduate work there; one of Joe's first tasks was to put up chicken wire to keep Pauling's hair out of the high-voltage line from the transformer to the x-ray tube. Joe received his B.S. degree in 1924 and moved on to Berkeley for graduate work in chemistry under gilbert Newton Lewis, who was one of the most important chemists of the first half of this century.

read more: https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb5974028v/_2.pdf

Joseph Edward Mayer (February 5, 1904, New York City – October 15, 1983) was a chemist who has formulated the Mayer expansion in statistical field theory.

He was professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego from 1960 to 1973. He was married to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer from 1930 until her death in 1972. He went to work with James Franck in Göttingen, Germany in 1929, where he met Maria, a student of Max Born. Joseph Mayer was president of the American Physical Society from 1973 to 1975.

He developed the cluster expansion method and Mayer-McMillan solution theory.
_______________________________________

Joseph Edward Mayer, one of the six initial members of the UCSD Chemistry Department, was a distinguished chemist, particularly renowned for work in the theory of statistical mechanics. Among many awards and honors, he had received the G. N. Lewis Medal (1958), the Peter Debye Award (1967) and the James Flack Norris Award (1969) from the American Chemical Society, the Chandler Medal (1966) from Columbia University, and the J. G. Kirkwood Medal from Yale (1967). He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1946. He received an honorary Sc.D. from Brussels in 1962. In his professional career, he was successively a member of the faculties of Johns Hopkins (1937-39), Columbia (1939-45), Chicago (1945-60), and UCSD (1960-72, emeritus 1972-83).

Joe 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. Encouraged by his home background and also by an excellent high school teacher, in 1921 he entered the California Institute of Technology to study chemistry.

Joe wrote an informative and amusing autobiographical sketch of the first part of his life entitled, "The Way It Was" ; this article was published in Annual Review of Physical Chemistry in 1982, volume 33, pages 1-23. Much of the following material is taken from it.

At Cal Tech he was in contact with R. C. Tolman, A. A. Noyes, and R. Dickinson of the chemistry faculty, who were all first-class scientists, and with graduate students Paul Emmett and Linus Pauling, who were soon to become famous as scientists themselves. Joe worked for Dickinson as an undergraduate assistant while Pauling was starting his graduate work there; one of Joe's first tasks was to put up chicken wire to keep Pauling's hair out of the high-voltage line from the transformer to the x-ray tube. Joe received his B.S. degree in 1924 and moved on to Berkeley for graduate work in chemistry under gilbert Newton Lewis, who was one of the most important chemists of the first half of this century.

read more: https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb5974028v/_2.pdf