Maria Skłodowska was born in Warsaw in 1867. By then, Poland had not been an independent country for most of a century. Warsaw was in the part controlled by the Russian czar. Her parents were teachers. Women were not permitted to study at the University of Warsaw. So Maria and her sister joined a secret floating university. Its night classes met in changing places to avoid the czar's police. Russian authorities had forbidden Poles to teach laboratory science. So Maria learned chemistry from a chemist at the beet-sugar factory.

On Sundays and evenings, Maria studied at a secret Museum. It was really an illegal lab. For years, she worked as a governess and tutor. In her spare time, she taught the children of Polish peasant workers to read. She risked punishment if the Russian authorities found out. As a teenager, she had made a pact with her sister. Maria would help support her sister's medical studies in Paris. Then her sister would help pay for Maria's studies. In time, Maria moved to Paris, France, to study at a university.

When Maria registered at the Sorbonne in Paris, she began using the French name Marie. She felt unprepared, but she worked hard to catch up. She finished first in her physics degree in 1893 and second in her math degree in 1894. She met Pierre Curie in 1894, and they married in 1895. Marie also earned degrees in physics and in math in Paris. A group of industrialists, the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry, asked her to study the magnetic properties of different steels. They wanted to know how those properties related to the steels' chemical composition.

In 1896, Henri Becquerel found that uranium gives off rays. Marie chose these rays for her thesis. So little had been published on them. With no long list of papers to read, she could start experiments right away. She found that the strength of the rays depended only on how much uranium was present. Compounds of thorium also give off rays. She invented the word radioactivity. The mineral pitchblende was more radioactive than uranium. So the Curies concluded it must contain other radioactive elements.

One new element was 400 times more radioactive than uranium. In 1898, it was added to the Periodic Table as polonium. The Curies announced polonium in July and radium in December of that year. Radium is named after the Latin word for ray. To separate it, Marie had to treat very large amounts of pitchblende ore. Much of the Curies' work took place in a shed. In 1910, she produced radium as a pure metal. The Curies published how they isolated radium, and they did not patent their methods.

French academics first proposed only Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel for the 1903 physics prize. But Pierre insisted that his wife share the honor. Marie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. In 1906, she became the first woman to hold a professor's post at the Sorbonne. In 1911, she won a second Nobel Prize, in chemistry, for her discovery of radium and polonium. She was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes. As of November 2026, she is still the only individual to have received a Nobel Prize in two different science categories.

In 1914, German armies advanced on Paris. Marie carried France's entire stock of radium for research, a single gram, to Bordeaux in a heavy lead box. During World War I, she organized mobile X-ray teams. Her daughter Irène, a scientist, worked with her. In 1995, the remains of Marie and Pierre Curie were moved to the Panthéon in Paris. This made Marie the first woman whose own accomplishments earned her the right to rest there alongside France's most eminent men. In 2014, a statue of Maria Skłodowska-Curie holding a model of a polonium atom was unveiled in Warsaw. As of November 2026, a notebook of hers from 1899 to 1902 is still radioactive. The Nobel Prize site says it will be for 1,500 years.

Words to know

• czar: Russian ruler
• pitchblende: a uranium ore
• thesis: a research paper
• patent: a legal claim
• radioactivity: rays from atoms