On November 7, 1867, in Warsaw, Poland, a baby girl named Maria Sklodowska was born into a family of teachers and big thinkers. At the time, Polish girls weren't even allowed to attend university, so Maria studied in secret with a group called the Floating University, sneaking from apartment to apartment to take science classes. When she was 24, she finally moved to Paris with almost no money, lived in a freezing attic, and sometimes fainted in class from hunger - but she earned top marks in both physics and math.
In Paris she met a quiet scientist named Pierre Curie, married him, and together they started chasing a strange glow they had spotted in certain rocks. Working in a leaky shed with no heat, they crushed and boiled tons of dark mineral called pitchblende. After four years of grinding labor they finally pulled out two brand-new chemical elements, which Marie named polonium (after Poland) and radium. She invented the word radioactivity to describe what these elements did.
In 1903, Marie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, sharing the physics prize with Pierre and another scientist. Then in 1911, she won a SECOND Nobel - this time in chemistry, all by herself - making her the first person ever to win Nobels in two different sciences. During World War I she rolled out portable X-ray vans she called petites Curies to help battlefield surgeons. More than 150 years after her birth, her notebooks are still so radioactive they're stored in lead-lined boxes - a tiny, glowing reminder of how hard one woman pushed science forward.
