In this Polish name, the surname is Skłodowska.

This article is about the Polish-French physicist. For the musician, see Marie
Currie. For other uses, see Marie Curie (disambiguation).
Marie Skłodowska-Curie

Curie, c. 1920
Born Maria Salomea Skłodowska
7 November 1867
Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire[1]
Died 4 July 1934 (aged 66)
Passy, Haute-Savoie, France
Cause of death Aplastic anemia[2]
Citizenship
Poland (by birth)
France (by marriage)
Alma mater
University of Paris
ESPCI[3]
Known for
Pioneering research on radioactivity
Discovering polonium and radium
Spouse Pierre Curie

(m. 1895; died 1906)

Children
IrèneÈve
Awards
Nobel Prize in Physics (1903)
Davy Medal (1903)
Matteucci Medal (1904)
Actonian Prize (1907)
Elliott Cresson Medal (1909)
Albert Medal (1910)
Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1911)
Willard Gibbs Award (1921)
John Scott Medal (1921)
Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of the University of Edinburgh (1931)
Scientific career
Fields
Physicschemistry
Institutions
University of Paris
Institut du Radium
École Normale Supérieure
French Academy of Medicine
International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation
Thesis Recherches sur les substances radioactives (Research on Radioactive
Substances) (1903)
Doctoral advisor Gabriel Lippmann
Doctoral students
André-Louis DebierneGioacchino FaillaLadislas GoldsteinÉmile HenriotIrène Joliot-
CurieÓscar MorenoMarguerite PereyFrancis Perrin
Signature

Notes
She is the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two sciences.

Birthplace of Marie Curie, at 16 Freta Street, in Warsaw, Poland.

Maria Salomea Skłodowska-Curie (Polish: [ˈmarja salɔˈmɛa skwɔˈdɔfska kʲiˈri] ⓘ; née
Skłodowska; 7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934), known simply as Marie Curie (/ˈkjʊəri/
KURE-ee,[4] French: [maʁi kyʁi]), was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and
chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman
to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, and the only
person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. Her husband, Pierre Curie,
was a co-winner of her first Nobel Prize, making them the first-ever married couple
to win the Nobel Prize and launching the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes.
She was, in 1906, the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris.
[5]

She was born in Warsaw, in what was then the Kingdom of Poland, part of the Russian
Empire. She studied at Warsaw's clandestine Flying University and began her
practical scientific training in Warsaw. In 1891, aged 24, she followed her elder
sister Bronisława to study in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and
conducted her subsequent scientific work. In 1895 she married the French physicist
Pierre Curie, and she shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with him and with the
physicist Henri Becquerel for their pioneering work developing the theory of
"radioactivity"—a term she coined.[6][7] In 1906 Pierre Curie died in a Paris
street accident. Marie won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of
the elements polonium and radium, using techniques she invented for isolating
radioactive isotopes. Under her direction, the world's first studies were conducted
into the treatment of neoplasms by the use of radioactive isotopes. She founded the
Curie Institute in Paris in 1920, and the Curie Institute in Warsaw in 1932; both
remain major medical research centres. During World War I she developed mobile
radiography units to provide X-ray services to field hospitals.

While a French citizen, Marie Skłodowska Curie, who used both surnames,[8][9] never
lost her sense of Polish identity. She taught her daughters the Polish language and
took them on visits to Poland.[10] She named the first chemical element she
discovered polonium, after her native country.[a] Marie Curie died in 1934, aged
66, at the Sancellemoz sanatorium in Passy (Haute-Savoie), France, of aplastic
anemia likely from exposure to radiation in the course of her scientific research
and in the course of her radiological work at field hospitals during World War I.
[12] In addition to her Nobel Prizes, she received numerous other honours and
tributes; in 1995 she became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in
the Paris Panthéon,[13] and Poland declared 2011 the Year of Marie Curie during the
International Year of Chemistry. She is the subject of numerous biographical works.

Life and career

Early years

Władysław Skłodowski and daughters (from left) Maria, Bronisława, and Helena, 1890
Maria Skłodowska was born in Warsaw, in Congress Poland in the Russian Empire, on 7
November 1867, the fifth and youngest child of well-known teachers Bronisława, née
Boguska, and Władysław Skłodowski.[14] The elder siblings of Maria (nicknamed
Mania) were Zofia (born 1862, nicknamed Zosia), Józef [pl] (born 1863, nicknamed
Józio), Bronisława (born 1865, nicknamed Bronia) and Helena (born 1866, nicknamed
Hela).[15][16]

On both the paternal and maternal sides, the family had lost their property and
fortunes through patriotic involvements in Polish national uprisings aimed at
restoring Poland's independence (the most recent had been the January Uprising of
1863–65).[17] This condemned the subsequent generation, including Maria and her
elder siblings, to a difficult struggle to get ahead in life.[17] Maria's paternal
grandfather, Józef Skłodowski [pl], had been principal of the Lublin primary school
attended by Bolesław Prus,[18] who became a leading figure in Polish literature.
[19]
Władysław Skłodowski taught mathematics and physics, subjects that Maria was to
pursue, and was also director of two Warsaw gymnasia (secondary schools) for boys.
After Russian authorities eliminated laboratory instruction from the Polish
schools, he brought much of the laboratory equipment home and instructed his
children in its use.[15] He was eventually fired by his Russian supervisors for
pro-Polish sentiments and forced to take lower-paying posts; the family also lost
money on a bad investment and eventually chose to supplement their income by
lodging boys in the house.[15] Maria's mother Bronisława operated a prestigious
Warsaw boarding school for girls; she resigned from the position after Maria was
born.[15] She died of tuberculosis in May 1878, when Maria was ten years old.[15]
Less than three years earlier, Maria's oldest sibling, Zofia, had died of typhus
contracted from a boarder.[15] Maria's father was an atheist, her mother a devout
Catholic.[20] The deaths of Maria's mother and sister caused her to give up
Catholicism and become agnostic.[21]

Maria (left) and sister Bronisława, c. 1886

When she was ten years old, Maria began attending the boarding school of J.
Sikorska; next, she attended a gymnasium for girls, from which she graduated on 12
June 1883 with a gold medal.[14] After a collapse, possibly due to depression,[15]
she spent the following year in the countryside with relatives of her father, and
the next year with her father in Warsaw, where she did some tutoring.[14] Unable to
enroll in a regular institution of higher education because she was a woman, she
and her sister Bronisława became involved with the clandestine Flying University
(sometimes translated as Floating University), a Polish patriotic institution of
higher learning that admitted women students.[14][15]

Krakowskie Przedmiescie 66, Warsaw, where Maria did her first scientific work,
1890–91
Maria made an agreement with her sister, Bronisława, that she would give her
financial assistance during Bronisława's medical studies in Paris, in exchange for
similar assistance two years later.[14][22] In connection with this, Maria took a
position first as a home tutor in Warsaw, then for two years as a governess in
Szczuki with a landed family, the Żorawskis, who were relatives of her father.[14]
[22] While working for the latter family, she fell in love with their son,
Kazimierz Żorawski, a future eminent mathematician.[22] His parents rejected the
idea of his marrying the penniless relative, and Kazimierz was unable to oppose
them.[22] Maria's loss of the relationship with Żorawski was tragic for both. He
soon earned a doctorate and pursued an academic career as a mathematician, becoming
a professor and rector of Kraków University. Still, as an old man and a mathematics
professor at the Warsaw Polytechnic, he would sit contemplatively before the statue
of Maria Skłodowska that had been erected in 1935 before the Radium Institute,
which she had founded in 1932.[17][23]

At the beginning of 1890, Bronisława—who a few months earlier had married Kazimierz
Dłuski, a Polish physician and social and political activist—invited Maria to join
them in Paris. Maria declined because she could not afford the university tuition;
it would take her a year and a half longer to gather the necessary funds.[14] She
was helped by her father, who was able to secure a more lucrative position again.
[22] All that time she continued to educate herself, reading books, exchanging
letters, and being tutored herself.[22] In early 1889 she returned home to her
father in Warsaw.[14] She continued working as a governess and remained there until
late 1891.[22] She tutored, studied at the Flying University, and began her
practical scientific training (1890–91) in a chemistry laboratory at the Museum of
Industry and Agriculture at Krakowskie Przedmieście 66, near Warsaw's Old Town.[14]
[15][22] The laboratory was run by her cousin Józef Boguski, who had been an
assistant in Saint Petersburg to the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev.[14][22][24]
Life in Paris
In late 1891, she left Poland for France.[25] In Paris, Maria (or Marie, as she
would be known in France) briefly found shelter with her sister and brother-in-law
before renting a garret closer to the university, in the Latin Quarter, and
proceeding with her studies of physics, chemistry, and mathematics at the
University of Paris, where she enrolled in late 1891.[26][27] She subsisted on her
meagre resources, keeping herself warm during cold winters by wearing all the
clothes she had. She focused so hard on her studies that she sometimes forgot to
eat.[27] Skłodowska studied during the day and tutored evenings, barely earning her
keep. In 1893, she was awarded a degree in physics and began work in an industrial
laboratory of Gabriel Lippmann. Meanwhile, she continued studying at the University
of Paris and with the aid of a fellowship she was able to earn a second degree in
1894.[14][27][b]

Skłodowska had begun her scientific career in Paris with a