Marie Curie
1867–1934 2 entries
Biography
Marie Curie was a Polish-born French physicist and chemist, a pioneer in the study of radioactivity. She was born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1867, at a time when women could not study at university there, and worked for years as a governess to help pay for her sister’s studies in Paris before following her there in 1891. At the Sorbonne she met the physicist Pierre Curie, whom she married in 1895, and together they discovered two new elements in 1898: polonium, named after her homeland, and radium.
In 1903 she shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Henri Becquerel, the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize, and in 1911 she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on her own, becoming the first person to be awarded two. After Pierre was killed in a street accident in 1906, she took over his chair and became the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne. During the First World War she equipped mobile X-ray units, known as “little Curies”, which helped to treat wounded soldiers at the front. She died in 1934 of an illness caused by years of exposure to radiation, and in 1995 her remains were moved to the Panthéon.
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