Pierre Curie
1859–1906, Paris, France, Paris, France
French physicist who, with Marie Curie, discovered the elements polonium and radium and shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Pierre Curie was already an accomplished physicist before turning to radioactivity: with his brother Jacques he discovered piezoelectricity in 1880, and his studies of magnetism produced Curie's law and the idea of symmetry in physics. In 1895 he married Maria Skłodowska; when she chose Becquerel's newly discovered rays as her research subject, Pierre joined her, and in 1898 the two announced the discovery of two new elements, polonium and radium. He died suddenly in 1906, killed in a street accident in Paris at the height of his career.
Nobel-winning work
The 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded half to Henri Becquerel and half to Pierre and Marie Curie 'in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel'. Pierre Curie turned the study of radioactivity into a quantitative science: using the piezoelectric electrometer he had invented with his brother Jacques to measure the feeble currents produced by radioactive materials, he and Marie measured the activity of ore samples and found pitchblende more radioactive than pure uranium — evidence that it contained unknown elements.
Through backbreaking chemical work, the couple isolated two new elements in 1898: polonium (named for Marie's native Poland) and radium, millions of times more radioactive than uranium. It was Marie Curie who coined the term 'radioactivity'. Pierre's earlier work on piezoelectricity (1880) and Curie's law of paramagnetism also shaped his science, but the Nobel specifically honoured the joint radiation research with Marie.
Workplaces: University of Paris (Sorbonne), École municipale de physique et de chimie industrielles, Paris
France