Marie Curie

Mrs. Sklodowska

The person we all know as Madame Curie, married to the French researcher Pierre Curie, was called Marie Skolodowska. She was born in Warsaw, where her father was a high school teacher and her mother was the headmistress of a boarding school for girls. Marie suffered from depression during her childhood and adolescence, and later worked as a governess.

In 1891 she moved to Paris, where her sister Bronislawa was studying medicine, and there she decided to enrol at the Sorbonne. She was a solitary girl, poorly dressed and only interested in books. There she studied physics and mathematics and also met her husband.

Marie Curie, as she was called from that time on, did not have an easy time during her research career because she was a woman. However, she did get recognition when she and her husband, together with Becquerel, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 for their discovery of radioactivity.

Eight years later, Marie received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on radium. Thus she became the first person in history to win two Nobel Prizes.