Maria Salomea Skłodowska Curie was born on this date in Warsaw, Poland to educator parents. Growing up in difficult circumstances due to her family's anti-Russian activities, she eventually moved to Paris to continue her scientific studies at the University of Paris where she met and married Pierre Curie, another researcher. The two went on to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 before Pierre Curie was killed in a traffic accident. She had been the first woman to earn a Nobel, became the first female professor ever at the University of Paris, and went on to add a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on radium. She died in 1934. (By John Osborne)
Susan Quinn, Marie Curie: A Life (Boston, MA: De Capo Press, 1995), 1-33 and passim.
