Marie Curie (Marya Sklodowska)

November 7th 1867 - July 4th 1934

She married the physicist Pierre Curie (1859-1906) in 1895 and soon began work on seeking radioactive elements other than uranium in pitchblende (to account for its unexpectedly high radioactivity). By 1898 she had discovered radium and polonium, although it took her four years to purify them. In 1903 the Curies shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Henri Becquerel, who had discovered radioactivity.