Marie Curie

Marie Curie was born in 1867 in Warsaw, Poland as Manya Sklodowska. She was a Polish-French Chemist .She was not only a great chemist, but she was well famous for her work on radioactivity and discovery of two new elements, polonium and radium, and she also broke boundaries for woman also. Curie was the first female professor at the University of Paris and was also the first woman to win two Nobel Peace Prizes for her work in Physics and Chemistry. 

Curie’s family was one that took for good education. For this reason, she left Poland and went to Paris to study mathematics, chemistry and physics. Marie, ever since her earliest years, was interested in reading and physics since her father was a physics teacher. She studied at the Sorbonne and in 1891, and she became the first female at to teach there. After finishing high school, Marie went on to Paris because of the fact that she couldn't obtain any form of a higher education in Poland. There, while living in poverty and working hard, she graduated in physics from the Sorbonne in 1893. Around that time she met Pierre Curie who taught physics at the University of Paris. They soon started to conduct research on radioactive substances and before long they got married. Pierre was also a physicist who had already made some important discoveries. He supported Marie all the way and Marie decided to study radioactivity in hopes of discovering something of a higher degree. Another reason why she chose this topic is because in 1896 Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity in uranium. Marie believed that there might be a new element in the uranium ore that Becquerel had worked on.

Marie tried to see if different compounds of uranium or thorium posses varying levels of radioactivity. When Marie's husband received a chair at the Sorbonne in 1904, she was asked to be a part time teacher at an all girls school in Paris. This was a long and grueling job that she had to perform in an old dissecting room. Then, after discovering these elements, Marie aimed to produce some pure radium. Then, in 1911, came the offspring of all this hard work- a Nobel Prize along with an advanced scientific degree in France. Curie found that thorium is radioactive. Henceforth she started to look for them. When she was done experimenting, Marie concluded that it made no difference what she mixed the uranium with, whether it was wet or dry, in a powder form or a solution; the only factor that really mattered was the amount of uranium present. The product of all this work was a mere one-tenth of a gram of radium. The following discovery that she made was, in a multitude of ways, the most fundamental.

In 1934 she died of leukemia that was probably induced by the extensive exposure to high levels of radiation involved by her studies. In dedication to her death, the Radium Institute was renamed the Curie Institute in her honor

In conclusion, Marie Curie was well known for her successful work on radioactivity and discovery of the elements polonium and radium and she managed to win two Nobel Peace Prizes for her accomplishments. She and her husband worked hard together to create and discover new elements and that Uranium was the key to make it happen. Her discovery made a great leap into chemistry and physics and she became one of the first female professors to achieve it. I liked researching about Marie Curie because she and her husband worked hard and pulled together to create a new element as well as develop new scientific theories. Another reason why I took it upon myself to write about her is because she was different; Marie Sklodowska Curie pioneered a field of work that was completely male dominated. Even though the first one that she obtained was awarded to her jointly with her husband and Henri Bequerel, it was still an astounding achievement for a woman in that time.

radium

Bibliography

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactivity

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1903/marie-curie-bio.html

http://www.aip.org/history/curie/

http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventors/curie.htm