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Marie Curie (née Maria Sklodowska) was born on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw, Poland, the daughter of a secondary school teacher. Her father provided her with some scientific training as well as a general education in local schools. She became active in a student revolutionary movement and decided to leave Warsaw, which was then under Russian control, for Cracow, which was then under Austrian power.
She moved to Paris in 1891 to further her studies at the Sorbonne, where she earned Licenciateships in Physics and Mathematical Sciences. In 1894, she met Pierre Curie, a professor at the School of Physics, and they married the following year. She replaced her husband as Head of the Physics Laboratory at the Sorbonne, earned her Doctor of Science degree in 1903, and after Pierre Curie's sad death in 1906, she became the first woman to hold the position of Professor of General Physics in the Faculty of Sciences.
She was also named Director of the Curie Laboratory at the University of Paris' Radium Institute, which was formed in 1914. Her early research, along with that of her husband, was often carried out under challenging circumstances, with inadequate laboratory facilities, and both of them having to teach to make a living.
The Curies' excellent research and analyses were motivated by Henri Becquerel's discovery of radioactivity in 1896, which led to the isolation of polonium, called after Marie's birth country, and radium. Mme. Curie devised procedures for isolating radium from radioactive leftovers in large enough quantities to allow for its characterisation and detailed examination of its qualities, particularly therapeutic qualities.
Throughout her life, Mme. Curie aggressively pushed the use of radium to alleviate suffering, and during World War I, she personally dedicated herself to this remedial work, helped by her daughter, Irene. She maintained her enthusiasm for science throughout her life and contributed significantly to the establishment of a radioactivity laboratory in Warsaw – in 1929, President Hoover of the United States presented her with a $ 50,000 gift from American science friends to purchase radium for use in the Warsaw laboratory. Mme.
Curie was revered and admired by scientists all over the world for her modest, dignified, and unassuming demeanour. From 1911 until her death, she was a member of the Conseil du Physique Solvay, and since 1922, she had been a member of the League of Nations' Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. Her work has been published in a number of scientific journals, and she is the author of several books, including Recherches sur les Substances Radioactives (1904), L'Isotopie et les Éléments Isotopes, and the famous Traité de Radioactivité (1910).
The various prizes given on Mme. Curie shows the importance of her work. She was awarded numerous honorary degrees in science, medicine, and law, as well as honorary memberships in learned organisations around the world. In 1903, she and her husband shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physics for their research into spontaneous radiation, which was discovered by Becquerel, who received the other half of the Prize. She was awarded a second Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in Chemistry, for her work in radioactivity.
In 1903, she and her husband shared the Davy Medal of the Royal Society, and in 1921, President Harding of the United States presented her with one gramme of radium on behalf of the women of America in acknowledgment of her contributions to science.
