Marie Curie.

Born Maria Salomea Skłodowska in Warsaw, Poland, in 1867, Marie Curie grew up in a family of educators. Her father, Władysław Skłodowski, taught physics and mathematics, while her mother, Bronisława, ran a prestigious boarding school. After her mother died of tuberculosis in 1878, Marie threw herself into her studies. She attended the Flying University, a secret institution that offered women higher education forbidden by the Russian authorities. In 1891 she left Poland for Paris to study at the Sorbonne, living in near-poverty on tea and toast to fund her education.

In 1898, Marie Curie discovered two new chemical elements: polonium, named after her native Poland, and radium. She coined the term radioactive to describe the phenomena she observed. In 1903 she shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel for their work on radioactivity. After Pierre’s death in 1906, she took his professorship at the Sorbonne, becoming the first woman to teach there. In 1911 she won a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for isolating pure radium. She also founded the Curie Institute in Paris in 1921 and later a second institute in Warsaw.

Marie married French physicist Pierre Curie in July 1895. The couple had two daughters: Irène, born in 1897, and Ève, born in 1904. Pierre’s life was cut short in 1906 when he was killed in a street accident in Paris. Marie later had a public affair with Paul Langevin, a married scientist, in 1911, which caused a scandal. She turned down several awards and insisted monetary gifts go to her institutes. Her daughter Irène followed her path, winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 with her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie.

Marie Curie remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. In 1995, in recognition of her contributions, her and Pierre’s remains were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris, the mausoleum for French national heroes. Albert Einstein cited her as one of the scientists he admired most. Her work with radioactive materials, done without proper shielding, led to her death from aplastic anemia in 1934. All her personal papers from that era remain too radioactive to handle, stored in lead-lined boxes. She is remembered as the pioneering scientist who unlocked the secrets of radioactivity and changed the course of modern science.