Marie Curie
1867–1934, Warsaw, Poland, Passy, France
Polish-French physicist and chemist, a pioneer of radioactivity research, the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
Together with her husband Pierre Curie, Marie Curie investigated the newly discovered phenomenon of radioactivity found by Henri Becquerel, discovering two new elements, polonium and radium (1898). She received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 (jointly with her husband and Becquerel) and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911 — becoming the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and still the only person to win them in two different sciences. Her work laid the foundation for modern nuclear physics.
Nobel-winning work
In 1903 Marie Curie shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel for their joint research on the radiation phenomena discovered by Becquerel. Beginning in 1898 she had shown that radioactivity is an atomic property of uranium and thorium, coined the term 'radioactivity', and — with Pierre — discovered the elements polonium and radium by processing tonnes of pitchblende.
In 1911 she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, alone, for the isolation of pure metallic radium (with André-Louis Debierne, 1910) and the exact determination of its atomic mass. She remains the only person awarded Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
Workplaces: University of Paris
Poland, France