Marie Curie, físico francés nacido en Polonia

Marie Curie, née Maria Salomea Skłodowska, (nacida el 7 de noviembre de 1867, Varsovia, Reino del Congreso de Polonia, Imperio ruso; falleció el 4 de julio de 1934, cerca de Sallanches, Francia), física francesa nacida en Polonia, famosa por su trabajo en radioactividad y dos veces ganador del Premio Nobel. Con Henri Becquerel y su esposo, Pierre Curie, fue galardonada con el Premio Nobel de Física en 1903. Ella fue la única ganadora del Premio Nobel de Química de 1911. Ella fue la primera mujer en ganar un Premio Nobel, y es la única mujer en ganar el premio en dos campos diferentes.

Preguntas principales

¿Qué logró Marie Curie?

Trabajando con su esposo, Pierre Curie, Marie Curie descubrió el polonio y el radio en 1898. En 1903 ganaron el Premio Nobel de Física por descubrir la radiactividad. En 1911 ganó el Premio Nobel de Química por aislar el radio puro. Después de trabajar en rayos X durante la Primera Guerra Mundial, estudió sustancias radiactivas y sus aplicaciones médicas.

¿Qué premios ganó Marie Curie?

Con Henri Becquerel y su esposo, Pierre Curie, Marie Curie recibió el Premio Nobel de Física de 1903. Ella fue la única ganadora del Premio Nobel de Química de 1911. Ella fue la primera mujer en ganar un Premio Nobel y la única mujer en ganar el premio en dos campos diferentes.

¿Por qué era importante Marie Curie?

Marie Curie’s contributions to physics were immense, not only in her own work, as indicated by her two Nobel Prizes, but also through her influence on subsequent generations of nuclear physicists and chemists. Her work paved the way for the discovery of the neutron and artificial radioactivity.

Early life

From childhood she was remarkable for her prodigious memory, and at the age of 16 she won a gold medal on completion of her secondary education at the Russian lycée. Because her father, a teacher of mathematics and physics, lost his savings through bad investment, she had to take work as a teacher and, at the same time, took part clandestinely in the nationalist “free university,” reading in Polish to women workers. At the age of 18 she took a post as governess, where she suffered an unhappy love affair. From her earnings she was able to finance her sister Bronisława’s medical studies in Paris, with the understanding that Bronisława would in turn later help her to get an education.

Move to Paris, Pierre Curie, and first Nobel Prize

In 1891 Skłodowska went to Paris and, now using the name Marie, began to follow the lectures of Paul Appel, Gabriel Lippmann, and Edmond Bouty at the Sorbonne. There she met physicists who were already well known—Jean Perrin, Charles Maurain, and Aimé Cotton. Skłodowska worked far into the night in her student-quarters garret and virtually lived on bread and butter and tea. She came first in the licence of physical sciences in 1893. She began to work in Lippmann’s research laboratory and in 1894 was placed second in the licence of mathematical sciences. It was in the spring of that year that she met Pierre Curie.

• 

• 

Their marriage (July 25, 1895) marked the start of a partnership that was soon to achieve results of world significance, in particular the discovery of polonium (so called by Marie in honour of her native land) in the summer of 1898 and that of radium a few months later. Following Henri Becquerel’s discovery (1896) of a new phenomenon (which she later called “radioactivity”), Marie Curie, looking for a subject for a thesis, decided to find out if the property discovered in uranium was to be found in other matter. She discovered that this was true for thorium at the same time as G.C. Schmidt did.

Turning her attention to minerals, she found her interest drawn to pitchblende, a mineral whose activity, superior to that of pure uranium, could be explained only by the presence in the ore of small quantities of an unknown substance of very high activity. Pierre Curie then joined her in the work that she had undertaken to resolve this problem and that led to the discovery of the new elements, polonium and radium. While Pierre Curie devoted himself chiefly to the physical study of the new radiations, Marie Curie struggled to obtain pure radium in the metallic state—achieved with the help of the chemist André-Louis Debierne, one of Pierre Curie’s pupils. On the results of this research, Marie Curie received her doctorate of science in June 1903 and, with Pierre, was awarded the Davy Medal of the Royal Society. Also in 1903 they shared with Becquerel the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of radioactivity.

The birth of her two daughters, Irène and Ève, in 1897 and 1904 did not interrupt Marie’s intensive scientific work. She was appointed lecturer in physics at the École Normale Supérieure for girls in Sèvres (1900) and introduced there a method of teaching based on experimental demonstrations. In December 1904 she was appointed chief assistant in the laboratory directed by Pierre Curie.

• 

• 

•