Marie Curie is widely regarded as a talented scientist whose work has changed the world. She is best known for her discovery of radium and polonium and her work with radioactivity. Curie encountered times of adversity in her career due to prejudice against women in her field, but she met her challenges and overcame them. Marie Curie exceeded the barriers put on women in her time to become one of the world’s most famous scientists and used her knowledge to the benefit of humanity.
Marie Curie was still young when she started breaking barriers. She was born as Marya Salomee Sklodowska on November 7, 1867 in Russia controlled Poland. From an early age, Sklodowska showed a great memory and exceptional intelligence (Yannuzzi 12). Her father encouraged her to see everything as a learning experience. This motivated her to focus on her education and receive the most value from it. (Huso 2). In Poland, not many institutions, including the University of Warsaw, welcomed women. She wanted so desperately to further pursue an education that she attended the Floating University or Flying University, an illegal underground school that admitted girls. It is was at the Flying University that she developed an interest in science and mathematics (Yannuzzi 23).
Even as she continued her education in Paris, she was blazing a path for women as she succeeded in a male dominated academic field. When Sklodowska registered for classes at the University of Paris, she used the French equivalent of her name, Marie. At La Sorbonne, women were the minority, with only 23 out of the two thousand students being female (Yannuzzi 37-38). With perseverance and little money, she got her master’s degree in physics as she graduated at the top of her class. Sklodo...
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...she was a woman in the early twentieth century. Marie Curie clearly conveys her stance on the issue when she proclaimed, “First principle: never let oneself be beaten down by persons or by events” (Huso 3).
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Pollack, Eileen. “Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?” The New York Times. The New York Times, 05 Oct. 2013. Web. 05 Mar. 2014.
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That same year Marie met Pierre Curie, an aspiring French physicist. A year later Maria Sklodowska became Madame Curie. Marie and Pierre worked as a scientific team, in 1898 their achievements resulted in world importance, in particular the discovery of polonium (which Marie named in honor of Poland) and the discovery of Radium a few months later. The birth of her two daughters, Irene and Eve, in 1897 and 1904 did not interrupt Maria's work. In 1903, Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize for Physics. The award jointly awarded to Curie, her husband Pierre, and Henri Becquerel, was for the discovery of radioactivity. In December 1904 she was appointed chief assistant in the laboratory directed by Pierre Curie.
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