Marie Curie enormously contributed to the fields of chemistry and physics despite social barriers towards women scientists. Marie Curie was a true scientific pioneer, and one of the first scientists to investigate radioactivity. She was the first scientist to recognize that radioactivity is the result of changes in the atoms of an element. She also discovered that radioactive elements radium and polonium exist only in microscopic quantities in nature. She also defined the basic unit of measurement for radioactivity-the curie-and prepared a standard sample of radium by which all other samples were measured. Her work helped open the field of atomic physics for study and because of her research and achievements she was awarded two Nobel prizes. She received one in physics in 1903 and one in chemistry in 1911. Today only three people, including Marie Curie, have achieved this distinction.
She was born in Warsaw, Poland, and her father was a physics and mathematics professor at one of Warsaw's gymnasiums, which are schools similar to American high schools. Marie had to overcome the Russian oppression of Poland, her family's poverty, and her oldest sister and her mother's death from tuberculosis. But despite the hardships of her life in Poland, Marie excelled in her studies at the gymnasium and was driven by her desire for a university education.
She began her scientific career as a student at the University of Paris (also known as Sorbonne) in 1891, when women scientists were virtually nonexistent. Women were not encouraged to study science, and were often actively discouraged from studying it by universities and society. Nevertheless, Marie followed her dream of doing scientific research, and she succeeded in gaining her Sorbonne degree. In the summer of 1883 she took the exam for her physical sciences degree and passed at the top of her class. Later that year, she returned to the Sorbonne to study for a license in mathematics, and she passed the exam in 1894, graduating with the second highest score.