This remarkable woman perhaps inherited her questioning, reasoning mind and her tenacity from her family - both qualities would certainly play a crucial part in her future accomplishments. A daughter of a free-thinking math teacher in increasingly volatile Eastern Europe under threat from Russian imperialism, she and her elder sister quickly formed an agreement to pursue further education in spite of their parents not being able to support it. She would work as a governess in affluent families, enabling her sister to travel to Paris and study. After two years, once her sister had a degree, their roles would reverse and her sister would support her travel to Paris for her own education!
After completing her part of the bargain, this woman went to Paris herself to study math and physics, and - well - created history. The recognition she got afterwards is apparent in the fact that she has universities named after her in the city of her birth as well as in Paris, apart from several institutes and laboratories and even a nuclear reactor. But were she alive today, she couldn't have cared less about all that - as she demonstrated amply in her lifetime. Nor would she have cared much about the fact that she was the first woman to win the Nobel, the first person to win two of them, and the only till date to win them two in two different science categories! Not to mention the first and only person whose spouse, daughter and son-in-law also won the coveted prize.
She would have been more proud of her discovering radioactivity as a subatomic phenomenon, discovering new elements radium and polonium (named on her native country), and the tremendous amount of research that she did, and enabled at several labs she helped start.
The Solvay 1927 group photograph (made famous on the internet now) of the best of the scientific minds has only one woman in it. But what a woman it is! Her work is second best to few if any and indeed towers over many. Happy 146th birth anniversary Maria Sklodowska, or Marie Curie.
After completing her part of the bargain, this woman went to Paris herself to study math and physics, and - well - created history. The recognition she got afterwards is apparent in the fact that she has universities named after her in the city of her birth as well as in Paris, apart from several institutes and laboratories and even a nuclear reactor. But were she alive today, she couldn't have cared less about all that - as she demonstrated amply in her lifetime. Nor would she have cared much about the fact that she was the first woman to win the Nobel, the first person to win two of them, and the only till date to win them two in two different science categories! Not to mention the first and only person whose spouse, daughter and son-in-law also won the coveted prize.
She would have been more proud of her discovering radioactivity as a subatomic phenomenon, discovering new elements radium and polonium (named on her native country), and the tremendous amount of research that she did, and enabled at several labs she helped start.
The Solvay 1927 group photograph (made famous on the internet now) of the best of the scientific minds has only one woman in it. But what a woman it is! Her work is second best to few if any and indeed towers over many. Happy 146th birth anniversary Maria Sklodowska, or Marie Curie.
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