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.