Marie Skłodowska Curie was born into an intelligentsia family in Warsaw on November 7, 1867. Her father and mother were teachers, people of integrity and strict morals, honest, hard working, staunch patriots and devoted Catholics. Her father, Władysław Skłodowski, was a mathematician and a physicist; he also was a writer and a translator. Mother Bronisława, neé Boguska, was owner and principal of a boarding school for girls. They raised five children, all of whom made fine careers: Józef (1863–1937) became a physician; Bronisława (1865–1939), married Dłuska, also became a physician and closely collaborated with Maria; Helena (1866–1961) married a teacher named Szalay who became Maria’s biographer; and the oldest, Zofia (1862–1874), died in the age of 12. Their mother died of tuberculosis in 1878, which resulted in Maria’s health and faith crisis.

Maria finished high school in 1883, obtaining the best grades in all her classes and a gold medal. She was fluent in Latin and several modern languages, and was known for her perfect memory. She was not able to continue her education because the Russians ruling at that time in Warsaw forbade women to study above the high school level. (From 1795 until 1918 Poland was partitioned between Russia, Prussia/Germany, and Austria; Warsaw was within Russian borders.) Instead, she took courses at the illegal underground “Flying University” that held classes clandestinely in private homes. In 1884 she began to work as a governess and private teacher in Warsaw. In 1886 she was hired as a governess by the Żurawski family and moved to their estate in Szczuki in the Mazovia region, where she worked for three and a half years. All the time she self-taught herself physics, chemistry, sociology, anatomy, and literature, and perfected her foreign languages. The son of her employers, Kazimierz Żurawski, fell in love with the young governess, a sentiment which she reciprocated, but his parents objected to the marriage. Å»urawski later became a well known scholar and professor of mathematics at the universities in Lwów, Kraków (where he was President of the Jagiellonian University), and Warsaw. Upon her return to Warsaw in 1889 Maria resumed work as a private tutor. Professor Józef Boguski, a chemist and a relative of the Skłodowski family, allowed her to do chemistry experiments in his laboratory at the Warsaw Museum of Industry and Agriculture. She also resumed her studies at the Flying University.

In the fall of 1891, Maria Skłodowska gathered enough funds to go to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. She worked extremely hard and lived in utter poverty. In two years she earned a degree (License) in physics (1893), topping the list of graduates, and the next year a degree (License) in mathematics (1894), second on the list. In the same year she received a grant for investigating the magnetic properties of various steels. She was allowed to do her experiments in the laboratory of Professor Gabriel Lipman. When she needed more lab space she got it at the Physics and Industrial Chemistry Schools (l’École municipale de physique at chimie de la ville de Paris) in the laboratory supervised by Professor Pierre Curie (1859–1906). The two scientists, Pierre Curie and Maria Skłodowska, worked side by side, shared scholarly interests, and developed a profound attachment to each other. But Maria decided to return to Poland in order to fulfill her patriotic ideals: to be a teacher and to contribute to her country’s cultural development. In ardent letters Pierre convinced her that in France, and as his wife, she might serve better – not only Poland, but the whole of humanity. She came back to Paris and they were married in 1895. They had two daughters: Irene (1897–1956) and Éve (1904–2007). Maria was a good and caring mother, and spent a lot of time with her children. She steered Irene towards sciences; Irene earned her doctorate in 1925 and married the chemical engineer Frederic Joliot. Their scholarly collaboration resulted in their joint Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1935. The younger daughter Éve became a journalist, pianist, and writer, and author of her mother’s biography.

Maria and Pierre worked as a team on the phenomenon of “radiation” and then on “radioactivity”. They shared adjacent and inadequately equipped laboratories. Maria focused on practical experiments, whereas Pierre was busy with theory, analyses, and calculations of the results. From 1898 to 1904, their laboratory was located at 12 L’Homond Street in a wooden shack with a glass roof (formerly used as a dissecting room). It was extremely hot in summer and cold in winter. There, for four years, Maria heated, boiled, and stirred for hours pitchblend containing uranite. (They received the pitchblend for free from a mine in Jáchymov in Bohemia. Until the 1920s Jáchymov was the only known source of radium ore in the world.) In 1898 the Curies theoretically discovered two new elements: “Polonium” (Po, atomic number 84) and “Radium” (Ra, atomic number 88). They continued their experiments to practically confirm their theories, making 5677 crystallizations of the blend, and finally obtaining a physical sample of “Radium” in 1902. Maria earned her doctorate in science in 1903. The same year, along with Henri Bequerel and Pierre Curie, she received the Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of radioactivity. In 1905, Pierre and Maria were offered a patent for industrial production of Radium by a chemical factory in Buffalo, NY. They refused to accept it, however, treating their discovery as a free contribution to science and a gift to the human race, consciously depriving themselves of a fortune.

After Pierre Curie suddenly died in a street accident on April 19, 1906, Maria Curie was appointed professor at the Sorbonne, the position previously occupied by her late husband. She was the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne. She published the fundamental treatise on radioactivity in 1910 (two volumes, 971 pages.) She received her second Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in chemistry, for the isolation of pure radium. In spite of this, the French Academy of Science refused to elect her a member (1911) – an obvious prejudice against women. She was, however, elected member of the French Academy of Medicine (1922).

A few years after Pierre Curie’s death, Maria entered into a relationship with Dr. Paul Langevin, her colleague and scholar, a married man and father of four, for which she was viciously attacked by the academic milieu and the press. After Langevin allegedly leaked her love letters to a newspaper, she broke off with him.

In 1912, Henryk Sienkiewicz (a writer, Nobel Prize winner in 1905) came to Paris as head of a Polish delegation and invited her back to Poland where a Radium Institute would be created with her at its head. She went to Poland where she was enthusiastically greeted and gave a public lecture. After much hesitation she did not accept the offer, however, merely promising to serve as an advisor of the planned institute. Back in France, she became head of the Radium Institute in Paris that was built especially for her and opened in 1914. During the first world war she developed a device for X-radiography, one of the many fruits of radium’s discovery. Assisted by her daughter Irene, she traveled with it to the front lines, often personally driving a truck, and took X-rays of thousands of wounded soldiers, saving many lives.

After the war she continued her work at the Radium Institute in Paris and was advising the Radium Institute in Warsaw which opened in 1932. Both institutes had two divisions: medical and laboratory. Although she lived in Paris, she maintained an apartment in the Warsaw Institute. She taught, mentored students and young scholars, and advised her peers. Discovery and application of radiation opened new scientific perspectives and resulted in many new discoveries in physics, chemistry, and medicine, including first results in curing cancer.

After her two Nobel prizes and a growing fame, she started to receive countless invitations for lectures, conferences, and official ceremonies. She traveled all over the world (although she hated traveling) and was awarded 19 honorary degrees by universities in many countries, including Belgium, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the USA. In 1921 she toured the United States as a lecturer, accompanied by her daughters. From the hands of President Warren G. Harding she received one gram of radium (worth about $100,000) paid for by American women, which she offered to Paris’ Radium Institute. She visited America again in 1929, and again she was hosted with great honors, this time by President Herbert Hoover. Again she received a gift from American women, another one gram of radium, which she gave to the Radium Institute in Warsaw. She also contributed financially to the construction and equipment of this Institute, as well as to many charities in France and Poland. She preserved deep emotional ties with her mother country and members of her family living in Poland. It was known that in spite of the decades of teaching and writing in French she always made her mathematical calculations counting loud in Polish.

She was active in many international organizations such as the International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations in Geneva, or the Solvay Council of Physics in Brussels. She maintained scholarly partnership with many leading scientists and friendship with some of them, such as Max Planck, Ernest Rutherford, and Henri Poincaré; she was especially close to Albert Einstein with whom she discussed both scientific subjects and moral aspects of progress in the sciences, and went on hiking in the Alps. She was also friends with scholars of different disciplines, such as historian Charles Siegnobos. In the 1920s she used to spend her summer vacations in the company of scholars on the sea in French Bretagne, swimming, rowing, and conducting debates.

She died of aplastic anaemia (a form of leukaemia) in the Sancellemoz sanatorium in the French Alps on July 4, 1934. Her illness was due to the years of exposure to radiation. She was buried in Sceaux, near Paris, next to her husband Pierre. In 1995 the ashes of the two of them were transferred by the French government to the Panthéon in Paris in a ceremony attended by Presidents of both France and Poland. She was the only woman to be recognized in this way.

Maria Skłodowska Curie’s achievements can be summarized as follows:

She was the first scholar to use the term “radioactivity” and to investigate this phenomenon (1898) She was the first woman to receive a doctorate in science (1903) She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize -- jointly with Pierre Curie and H. Becquerel (1903) She was the first female professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris (1906) She was the first person to win a second Nobel Prize (1911) and the first person to win two Nobel Prizes She was instrumental in creating two Radium Institutes – in Paris (1914) and in Warsaw (1932) She wrote several books and hundreds of scholarly articles, and she presented papers at many conferences She has been described as a “major figure” in the history of physics, chemistry, and medicine; as “the greatest woman scientist”; as “the most inspirational woman ever”; as the scholar who was “moving forward” the frontiers of sciences. In his book Six Great Scientists: Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Marie Curie, Einstein (1995), J. G. Crowther included her in the group of the most important scientists of all times Several schools in many countries have been named after Maria Skłodowska Curie – in Poland alone 12 elementary schools, 45 vocational schools, and 73 high schools A University in Lublin, Poland, is named after her: Uniwersytet imienia Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej Many streets both in Poland and in France bear her name Her statues adorn many public sites A subway (metro) station in Paris was named “Pierre et Marie Curie” (2007) The Museum of Skłodowska-Curie has been established in Warsaw Several biographies, novels, and dramas have been written about her life and work, and movies about her and her husband have also been produced

Selected Bibliography

Books by Marie Curie

Correspondence, 1974, published in French
Prace / L’Ouvres, 1954, published in Polish and French
Radioactivité, 19 editions between 1935 and 1960, in 6 languages
L’isotopie at les elements isotopes, 12 editions between 1924 and 1997 in French
Pierre Curie, 53 editions in between 1923 and 1999, in 5 languages
Traité de radioactivité, 19 editions between 1910 and 2008, 6 languages
Radioactive subsbstances, 53 editions between 1903 and 2001, in 5 languages

Films

Madame Curie, American production, 1943
Marie Curie, une femme honorable French prod., 1990
Monsieur et Madame Curie French production, 1953
Mysli o radiatsii [Thoughts on Radiation] Soviet production, 1980

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Citation: Braun, Kazimierz. "Marie Skłodowska Curie". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 October 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12594, accessed 03 July 2025.]