Marie Curie: ten times first

November 12, 2012

Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.

Marie Curie

Intelligence, rigor, will, imagination, passion… these were some of the qualities of Marie Curie, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. But there were more things in which she was a pioneer. We list them below:

1. Top of her class when she finished high school at the age of 15 (1883). She was awarded a gold medal.

2. The first woman to graduate in Physics at the Sorbonne University. That year (1893) only two women graduated in the entire University of Paris. Marie was also the first in her class.

3. The first person to use the term radioactivity (1898).

4. The first woman in Europe to receive a doctorate in science (1903).

5. The first woman to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics (1903). The prize was awarded to her, together with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel, for the discovery of radioactivity.

6. The first woman to be a professor and head of laboratory at the Sorbonne University (1906).

7. The first person to have two Nobel Prizes. The second was in Chemistry, in 1911, for having prepared radium and researched its compounds.

8. The first woman to be a member of the French Academy of Medicine (1922).

9. The first Nobel mother with a Nobel daughter. In 1935 her daughter Irene was awarded the prize in Chemistry.

10. The first woman to be buried under the dome of the Pantheon on her own merits (1995).