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Marie Curie was born Marya (or Maria) Sklodowska in Warsaw, Poland on November 7, 1867. She died of leukemia in July, 1934, largely brought on by her experiments with radium.
She met Pierre Curie, Professor in the School of Physics at the Sorbonne, in Paris in 1894. They married in 1895. Together they expanded on Henri Becquerel's discovery of radiation in 1896, discovering and isolating polonium and radium.
Personal Accomplishments
She succeeded her husband as Head of the Physics Laboratory at the Sorbonne, and gained her Doctor of Science degree in 1903. After Pierre died in 1906, she took his position as Professor of General Physics in the Faculty of Sciences. She was the first woman to hold this position.
Mme. Curie developed methods for the separation of radium from radioactive residues in sufficient quantities to allow for its characterization and the careful study of its properties, therapeutic properties in particular.
In 1903, together with Becquerel, the Curies were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery of natural radioactivity. In 1911 she received a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, in recognition of her work in radioactivity.
She was also appointed Director of the Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris, founded in 1914.
Some of her most important works include Recherches sur les Substances Radioactives (1904), L'Isotopie et les Éléments Isotopes and Traité' de Radioactivité (1910).
Read more about Marie Curie on CR4.
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