Birth: November 7, 1867, Warsaw, Poland, born Marie Sklodowska
Death: July 4, 1934, Savoy, France
Early Influences:
- Father was a secondary school teacher
- Decided to leave Poland after becoming involved in a students' revolutionary organization
- Met and married physicist Pierre Curie in 1894-5
Education:
- General education at local schools
- Earned degrees in math(1893) and physics(1894) from the Sorbonne, Paris
- Obtained a doctorate for her thesis on radioactive substances
Major Accomplishments:
- Found that the strength of the radiation emitted from Uranium was proportional to the Uranium content and constant over time.
- Discovered that pitchblende contained a radiating element
- Won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 with her husband and Henri Becquerel for the discovery of radioactivity
- Won a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the isolation of pure radium
- Received the Davy Medal of the Royal Society in 1903
Significance:
- Along with her husband and Becquerel, discovered radioactivity
- Isolated pure radium
- Worked to develop radioactivity for medical uses
- Work precursed the splitting of the atom
- Became the first woman lecturer at the Sorbonne
Contemporaries:
- Pierre Curie - French Physicist
- Antoine Henri Becquerel - French Physicist
- Woodrow Wilson - 28th President of the United States
