Marie Curie facts: radioactivity, prizes, and firsts

Marie Curie facts tell the story of a scientist who kept breaking barriers while uncovering a new way to understand matter. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win twice, and the only person to earn Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields.

How did Marie Curie change science?

Marie Curie changed science by studying radioactivity and concluding that the radiation she examined must come from the atom itself. That idea helped disprove the notion that atoms were indivisible.

She and Pierre Curie also coined the word radioactivity during their research. Their work built on the radioactivity phenomena discovered by Henri Becquerel, and it placed Marie Curie at the center of a new scientific field.

What did Marie Curie discover?

Marie Curie discovered radium and polonium, and she named polonium after her native country. She and Pierre Curie published a joint paper in July 1898 announcing polonium, and on 26 December 1898 they announced the existence of radium.

The scale of the work was enormous. From a tonne of pitchblende, Marie Curie and Pierre Curie separated one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride in 1902. Marie Curie later isolated pure radium metal in 1910.

What Nobel Prizes did Marie Curie win?

Marie Curie won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre Curie for their joint research on radioactivity phenomena discovered by Henri Becquerel. In 1911, she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of radium and polonium and for isolating radium and studying its nature and compounds.

Those honors came with another first. Marie Curie and Pierre Curie were the first married couple to win the Nobel Prize. She also remained the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields.

What positions and institutions did Marie Curie build?

Marie Curie became the first woman faculty member at the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles in 1900. Six years later, she became the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris.

She also founded major institutions that carried her work forward: the Curie Institute in Paris in 1920 and the Curie Institute in Warsaw in 1932. During the First World War, she developed mobile radiography units to provide X-ray services to field hospitals.

Marie Curie’s career joined discovery, teaching, and medical service in one life. She linked the atom, the laboratory, and the hospital through work that changed chemistry, physics, and medicine.

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