Marie Curie is probably the first name that comes to mind when you think of
important women chemists. Cuire
was a French physicist who became famous for her research on radioactivity. She
was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person to win two Nobel
Prizes, one in physics and one in chemistry.
Originally named Marja Sklodowska, Marie Curie was born in Warsaw on November 7, 1867. Her father taught high school physics. In 1891 she went to Paris (where she changed her name to Marie) and enrolled in the Sorbonne. Two years later she passed the examination for her degree in physics, ranking in first place. She met Pierre Curie in 1894, and they married in 1895.
Curie and her husband, Pierre, also a physicist, worked together in studying the
radiation given off by radioactive substances. They found that uranium ore
contained much more radioactivity than could be accounted for by the uranium
itself. The Curies then began to search for the source of the radioactivity.
They separated minute amounts of two new highly radioactive chemical elements
from tons of uranium ore, called pitchblende. The Curies named the elements
radium and polonium. For this work, they and Antoine Henri Becquerel, a French
physicist who discovered natural radioactivity, received the 1903 Nobel Prize in
physics.
In 1904 Pierre Curie was appointed professor of physics at the University of Paris, and in 1905 he was named a member of the French Academy. Such positions were not then commonly held by women, and Marie was not similarly recognized. When Pierre's died in 1906 Marie Curie took over his classes and continued her own research. In 1911 she received an unprecedented second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry, for her work on radium and radium compounds. She became head of the Paris Institute of Radium in 1914 and helped found the Curie Institute.