Curie, Marie, originally Maria, n�e Sklodowska 1867-1934
Polish-born French physicist

Marie Curie was born in Warsaw and brought up in poor surroundings after her father, who had studied mathematics at the University of St Petersburg, was denied work for political reasons. After brilliant high school studies, she worked as a governess for eight years, during which time she saved enough money to send her sister to Paris to study. In 1891 she too went to Paris where she graduated in physics from the Sorbonne (1893) taking first place; she then received an Alexandrovitch Scholarship from Poland which allowed her to study mathematics.

She met Pierre Curie in 1894 and they married the following year. Together they worked on magnetism and radioactivity (a term she invented in 1898), and isolated radium, and polonium, which she named after her native Poland. They were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1903, with Antoine Henri Becquerel. After her husband's death in 1906 she succeeded him as Professor of Physics at the Sorbonne. She isolated pure radium in 1910, and received the 1911 Nobel Prize for chemistry.

During World War I she developed X-radiography and afterwards became director of the research department at the newly established Radium Institute in Paris (1918-34). She was also Honorary Professor of Radiology at Warsaw (1919-34). She died of leukaemia, probably caused by her long exposure to radioactivity. Her elder daughter was the nuclear physicist Ir�ne Joliot-Curie; her second daughter Eve (1904- ), became well known as a musician and writer, and in World War II worked in the USA on behalf of the French Resistance movement. She also wrote a biography of her mother.

Bibliography: S Quinn, Marie Curie: A Life (1995); Eve Curie, Madame Curie (1937, Eng trans 1943).