• She was born Maria Salomea Sklodowska in 1867 in Warsaw, Poland

• Her father, a math and physics professor, and her mother, headmistress of a respected boarding school in Russian-occupied Warsaw, instilled in their five kids a love of learning.

• The local university didn’t let women enroll, and their family didn’t have the money to send them abroad.

• At the University of Paris, Curie was inspired by French physicist Henri Becquerel he discovered that uranium emitted something that looked an awful lot like — but not quite the same as — X-rays. Curie decided to explore uranium and its mysterious rays as a Ph.D. thesis topic.

• Around the same time, Curie met and married her French husband, Pierre, an accomplished physicist who abandoned his own work and joined his wife’s research.

• In 1903, Curie, her husband and Becquerel won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on radioactivity, making Curie the first woman to win a Nobel.

• She died in 1934 from a type of anemia that very likely stemmed from her exposure to such extreme radiation during her career. In fact, her original notes and papers are still so radioactive that they’re kept in lead-lined boxes, and you need protective gear to view them.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-10-greatest-scientists-of-all-time