Marie Curie was born in Warsaw Poland on November 7, 1867.Her work on radioactivity is credited with setting the groundwork for much of the 20th century's atomic science. She and husband Pierre were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1903, and she herself won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1911, becoming the first person to win two such prizes. She eventually occupied a professorship in physics at the Sorbonne, where she had taken her own degree in physics.
Marie Curie died of leukemia, secondary to her long-term exposure to radioactive materials. Her notebooks remain too radioactive to safely handle.