Marie Skłodowska Curie
Marie Skłodowska Curie, born Maria Salomea Skłodowska, was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity.
Born: November 7, 1867, Warsaw, Poland
Died: July 4, 1934, Passy, Haute-Savoie, France
Spouse: Pierre Curie (m. 1895–1906)
Children: Irène Joliot-Curie, Ève Curie
She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to win twice, the only person to win twice in multiple sciences, and was part of the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes.
She was also the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris.
She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie and with physicist Henri Becquerel. She won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
While a French citizen, Marie Skłodowska Curie (she used both surnames) never lost her sense of Polish identity. She taught her daughters the Polish language and took them on visits to Poland. She named the first chemical element that she discovered — polonium, which she isolated in 1898 — after her native country.
Curie died in 1934, aged 66, at sanatorium in Sancellemoz (Haute-Savoie), France, due to aplastic anemia brought on by exposure to radiation while carrying test tubes of radium in her pockets during research, and in the course of her service in World War I mobile X-ray units that she had set up.
She used an innovative technique to investigate samples. Fifteen years earlier, her husband and his brother had developed a version of the electrometer, a sensitive device for measuring electric charge. Using Pierre’s electrometer, she discovered that uranium rays caused the air around a sample to conduct electricity. Using this technique, her first result was the finding that the activity of the uranium compounds depended only on the quantity of uranium present.
She hypothesized that the radiation was not the outcome of some interaction of molecules but must come from the atom itself. This hypothesis was an important step in disproving the ancient assumption that atoms were indivisible.
Awards, honours, and tributes
Nobel Prize in Physics (1903)
Davy Medal (1903, with Pierre)
Matteucci Medal (1904; with Pierre)
Actonian Prize (1907)
Elliott Cresson Medal (1909)
Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1911)
Franklin Medal of the American Philosophical Society (1921)
