Marie Curie becomes the first woman to win a Nobel Prize

On 10 December 1903, Marie Curie became the first woman ever awarded a Nobel Prize, sharing the Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel for their research into radioactivity — a term she coined. Born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1867, she had overcome both gender and nationality barriers to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she met Pierre. Their joint research into uranium and thorium revealed that radioactivity was an atomic property of matter itself, not a chemical reaction. In 1911 she received a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for isolating pure radium and polonium — making her the first person, male or female, to win the prize in two different scientific disciplines. She remains the only person to have done so. Her discoveries laid the foundation for nuclear physics, cancer radiotherapy, and medical imaging. She died in 1934 from aplastic anaemia caused by decades of radiation exposure.