Marie Curie

Marie Curie (born Manya Sklodowska in Warsaw, Poland on November 7, 1867), was a pioneer in radioactivity research and the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. She died of leukaemia on July 4, 1934.

She studied mathematics, chemistry and physics at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1891, becoming the first woman to teach there. Whilst teaching there she met Pierre Curie, a physics teacher at the University of Paris. Marrying soon after, they began joint research on radioactive substances. In 1903, Marie and Pierre jointly won the Nobel Prize for discovering radium and polonium, with Antoine Henri Bacquerel who had independently discovered natural radioactivity in 1896. In 1903, she also received, again jointly with her husband, the Davy Medal of the Royal Society.

When Pierre died in 1906, Marie devoted herself to continuing the work that they had begun together. She received a second Nobel Prize, for Chemistry, in 1911. Throughout her life, Marie Curie promoted the use of radium to alleviate suffering, and during World War I, assisted by her daughter, Iréne, she personally devoted herself to this work. In 1921, President Harding of the USA, on behalf of the women of America, presented her with one gram of radium in recognition of her service to science, and in 1929 President Hoover of the USA presented her with $50,000 donated by American friends of science to purchase radium for use in the radioactivity laboratory in Warsaw which she had helped to establish.

Irene Joliot-Curie, the daughter of Marie & Pierre Curie, who was born in Paris on September 12, 1897, also received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935, jointly with her husband Jean Frédéric.

• BBC History Marie Curie (1867 - 1934)
• 1903 Nobel prize in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel.
• 1911 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element.
• Nobel Lecture December 11, 1911 "Radium and the New Concepts in Chemistry"
• Irene Joliot-Curie Nobel prize in recognition of their synthesis of new radioactive elements.
• Marie Curie's Nobel Prizes National Atomic Museum