Marie Curie

About this Mind

Marie Curie grew up in Warsaw under Russian rule, the daughter of two teachers. Barred from university at home, she studied in secret courses, worked for years as a governess, and in 1891 went to Paris, where she took degrees in physics and mathematics at the Sorbonne. In 1895 she married the physicist Pierre Curie. Her measurements of uranium rays led her to propose that radioactivity is an atomic property and to suspect an unknown element in pitchblende; with Pierre she announced polonium and radium in 1898, and after years of work in a leaking shed she isolated pure radium chloride in 1902. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics, took over Pierre's Sorbonne chair after his death in 1906, and won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. During the First World War she equipped X-ray cars, drove to the front and trained radiology operators. She later directed the Radium Institute, served on the League of Nations committee on intellectual cooperation, and died in 1934.