Marie Curie was a Polish-born physicist and chemist and one of the most famous scientists of her time. Together with her husband Pierre, she discovered radium, an element widely used for treating cancer, and studied uranium and other radioactive substances. Together with Pierre she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903. Marie was born in Warsaw, Poland, on 7 November 1867, the daughter of a physics teacher.

At an early age she displayed a brilliant mind and a blithe personality, and her great exuberance for learning prompted her to continue her studies after high school. She became disgruntled, however, when she learned that the university in Warsaw was closed to women. Determined to receive a higher education, she left Poland and in 1891 entered the Sorbonne, a French university, where she earned her master's degree and doctorate in physics.

At the Sorbonne she studied with some of the greatest scientists of her day, one of whom was Pierre Curie. Marie and Pierre were married in 1895 and spent many productive years working together in the physics laboratory. A short time after they discovered radium, Pierre was killed by a horse-drawn wagon in 1906.

Marie was stunned by the misfortune, and the fact that she had two young daughters to raise by herself greatly increased her distress. Her feeling of desolation finally began to fade when she was asked to succeed her husband as a physics professor at the Sorbonne, becoming the first woman to be given a professorship at the world-famous university. She received a second Nobel Prize, in Chemistry, for isolating radium in 1911. Although Marie Curie eventually suffered a fatal illness from her long-term exposure to radium, she never became disillusioned about her work, and regardless of the consequences she had dedicated herself to science and to revealing the mysteries of the physical world.