MARIE CURIE was born on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw a polish city. Until she married Pierre Curie (July 25, 1895), her name was Maria Sklodowska. She was a French physicist, famous for her work on radioactivity and winner of the Nobel Price twice; The first time was in 1903, she was awarded for physics with Henri Becquerel and her husband. And the second time; she won the Nobel Price for chemistry in 1911.

 

From childhood, she was also remarkable for her prodigious memory which gave her a gold medal on completion of her secondary education at the Russian lycée at the age of 16. At 18, she became governess and with this job, Marie Sklodowska was able to finance her sister Bronia’s medical studies in Paris.

 

In 1891, she went to Paris and began to follow the lectures of Edmond Bouty, Gabriel Lippmann and Paul Appel at the Sorbonne. Marie met some physicists already well known like Jean Perrin, Charles Maurain or Aimé Cotton. Then, in 1897 she got the degree of physics and began to work in Lippmann’s research laboratory. The year after, she was placed second in the degree of mathematical sciences. It was in the spring of this year that she met Pierre Curie.

 

She married Pierre Curie on July 25 of 1895 and it was the beginning of a partnership in research. She had concentrated her attention to pitchblende, a mineral with a very high activity which could only be explained by the presence of an unknown substance of important activity. When her husband joined her in the work she had undertaken to resolve the problem, he helped her to discover new elements: polonium and radium. On the result of this research, the physicist received her doctorate of science in June 1903 and the Davy Medal of the Royal Society, with Pierre.

 

Her scientific work wasn’t interrupted by the birth of her two daughters, Irene and Eve, in 1897 and 1904. In 1900, she was named lecturer in Physics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure for girls in Sèvres and introduced a method of teaching based on experiments.

 

Then, in December 1904, the discoverer of radioactivity was appointed chief assistant in the laboratory directed by her husband Pierre Curie.

 

The death of Pierre Currie in April 19 of 1906 was a sort of shock in Marie's life but it was a turning point of her career too. In 1908 she became professor and in 1910 her treatise on radioactivity was published, three years later she won the Nobel Prize for chemistry.

 

During World War One, this physicist, with the help of her daughter, pade a huge work for the development of the use of X-Radiography. After war, in 1921 Marie Curie made a triumphant journey to the U.S and they visited a lot of countries, she had become famous all over the world. Moreover she managed to create the Curie Foundation of Paris in 1932 and the Radium Institute in Warsaw.

 

The main outstanding achievement of Marie Curie was to have understood the need to accumulate intense radioactive sources, not only for the treatment of illness but also to maintain an abundant supply for research in nuclear physics. Her work prepared the way for many discoveries, later.

 

A few months after the discovery of the radioactivity, the physicist died of leukaemia caused by her exposure to the radium that made her famous.

 

In 1995, Marie Curie was enshrined in the Pantheon in Paris ; she was the first woman to receive this honour for her achievements.

 

 

Sophie, Anne-Sophie, Laura, Sébastien

Première L & S, 2000-2001