Maria Skłodowska was born in Russian-occupied Warsaw in 1867. Forbidden as a woman from attending Polish universities, she studied at a clandestine 'Floating University' before moving to Paris in 1891 to enrol at the Sorbonne, where she graduated first in her physics class. She married Pierre Curie in 1895; together, working in a leaking shed at the École de Physique with literally tonnes of pitchblende ore, they isolated two new elements — polonium (named for her homeland) and radium. In 1903 she became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, sharing the Physics prize with Pierre and Henri Becquerel. After Pierre's death in a Paris street accident in 1906, she carried on alone; in 1911 she won a second Nobel, this time in Chemistry, for the isolation of pure radium — making her the first person of any gender to win Nobels in two different sciences. The Curies refused to patent the radium-isolation process, declaring that science belonged to all humanity. Marie died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia, almost certainly from her decades of unshielded exposure to radiation. Her notebooks remain so radioactive that researchers must wear protective clothing to read them.
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Physicist · Chemist · Two-time Nobel Laureate
Marie Curie
1,867 CE – 1,934 CE
The Polish-French physicist who discovered radium, won two Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, and refused to patent her work.
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