Marie Curie
Physicist and chemist; the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the only person to win in two sciences.
Ideas
- Radioactivity is atomic
- She showed that radiation comes from inside the atom itself, not from chemical reactions. She coined the word radioactivity.
- Polonium and radium
- With Pierre Curie she discovered two new elements, isolating radium by hand from tonnes of ore.
- Science in the field
- In the First World War she built mobile X-ray units, nicknamed petites Curies, and drove them to the front.
In their words
“One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.”
Start with
- Research on Radioactive Substances (1903)
- Treatise on Radioactivity (1910)
- Pierre Curie (1923)
