Puolassa syntynyt ranskalainen fyysikko Marie Curie

Marie Curie, néma Maria Salomea Skłodowska, (syntynyt 7. marraskuuta 1867 Varsovassa, Puolan kongressin kuningaskunnassa, Venäjän valtakunnassa - kuollut 4. heinäkuuta 1934 lähellä Sallanchesia, Ranska), puolalainen syntynyt ranskalainen fyysikko, kuuluisa radioaktiivisuustyöstään ja kahdesti Nobel-palkinnon voittaja. Henri Becquerel ja hänen aviomiehensä Pierre Curie saivat hänelle 1903 Nobelin fysiikan palkinnon. Hän oli vuoden 1911 Nobel-kemian palkinnon ainoa voittaja. Hän oli ensimmäinen nainen, joka voitti Nobel-palkinnon, ja hän on ainoa nainen, joka voitti palkinnon kahdella eri alalla.

Suosituimmat kysymykset

Mitä Marie Curie saavutti?

Yhteistyössä aviomiehensä Pierre Curien kanssa Marie Curie löysi poloniumin ja radumin vuonna 1898. Vuonna 1903 he voittivat Nobelin fysiikan palkinnon radioaktiivisuuden löytämisestä. Vuonna 1911 hän voitti Nobelin kemian palkinnon puhtaan radiumin eristämisestä. Ensimmäisen maailmansodan röntgensäteilytyön jälkeen hän tutki radioaktiivisia aineita ja niiden lääketieteellisiä sovelluksia.

Mitä palkintoja Marie Curie voitti?

Henri Becquerelin ja hänen aviomiehensä Pierre Curien kanssa Marie Curie sai 1903 Nobelin fysiikan palkinnon. Hän oli vuoden 1911 Nobel-kemian palkinnon ainoa voittaja. Hän oli ensimmäinen nainen, joka voitti Nobel-palkinnon, ja ainoa nainen, joka voitti palkinnon kahdella eri alalla.

Miksi Marie Curie oli tärkeä?

Marie Curie’s contributions to physics were immense, not only in her own work, as indicated by her two Nobel Prizes, but also through her influence on subsequent generations of nuclear physicists and chemists. Her work paved the way for the discovery of the neutron and artificial radioactivity.

Early life

From childhood she was remarkable for her prodigious memory, and at the age of 16 she won a gold medal on completion of her secondary education at the Russian lycée. Because her father, a teacher of mathematics and physics, lost his savings through bad investment, she had to take work as a teacher and, at the same time, took part clandestinely in the nationalist “free university,” reading in Polish to women workers. At the age of 18 she took a post as governess, where she suffered an unhappy love affair. From her earnings she was able to finance her sister Bronisława’s medical studies in Paris, with the understanding that Bronisława would in turn later help her to get an education.

Move to Paris, Pierre Curie, and first Nobel Prize

In 1891 Skłodowska went to Paris and, now using the name Marie, began to follow the lectures of Paul Appel, Gabriel Lippmann, and Edmond Bouty at the Sorbonne. There she met physicists who were already well known—Jean Perrin, Charles Maurain, and Aimé Cotton. Skłodowska worked far into the night in her student-quarters garret and virtually lived on bread and butter and tea. She came first in the licence of physical sciences in 1893. She began to work in Lippmann’s research laboratory and in 1894 was placed second in the licence of mathematical sciences. It was in the spring of that year that she met Pierre Curie.

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Their marriage (July 25, 1895) marked the start of a partnership that was soon to achieve results of world significance, in particular the discovery of polonium (so called by Marie in honour of her native land) in the summer of 1898 and that of radium a few months later. Following Henri Becquerel’s discovery (1896) of a new phenomenon (which she later called “radioactivity”), Marie Curie, looking for a subject for a thesis, decided to find out if the property discovered in uranium was to be found in other matter. She discovered that this was true for thorium at the same time as G.C. Schmidt did.

Turning her attention to minerals, she found her interest drawn to pitchblende, a mineral whose activity, superior to that of pure uranium, could be explained only by the presence in the ore of small quantities of an unknown substance of very high activity. Pierre Curie then joined her in the work that she had undertaken to resolve this problem and that led to the discovery of the new elements, polonium and radium. While Pierre Curie devoted himself chiefly to the physical study of the new radiations, Marie Curie struggled to obtain pure radium in the metallic state—achieved with the help of the chemist André-Louis Debierne, one of Pierre Curie’s pupils. On the results of this research, Marie Curie received her doctorate of science in June 1903 and, with Pierre, was awarded the Davy Medal of the Royal Society. Also in 1903 they shared with Becquerel the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of radioactivity.

The birth of her two daughters, Irène and Ève, in 1897 and 1904 did not interrupt Marie’s intensive scientific work. She was appointed lecturer in physics at the École Normale Supérieure for girls in Sèvres (1900) and introduced there a method of teaching based on experimental demonstrations. In December 1904 she was appointed chief assistant in the laboratory directed by Pierre Curie.

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