Marie Curie
Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize and also the first person to win the Nobel Prize twice. Curie coined the term "radioactive" to describe the uranium emissions she observed in early experiments. With her husband, she later discovered the elements polonium and radium. A dedicated and respected physicist, her brilliant work with radioactivity eventually cost her her life; she died from overexposure to radiation.
Marie Curie's Notebooks
French physicist Marie Curie and her husband made many discoveries about radioactive elements that affected the fields of physics and chemistry for years. In 1898 they deduced that radioactivity is a phenomenon associated with atoms, independent of their physical or chemical state. They also discovered that radioactivity was a more concentrated source of energy than had been known before. Shown here are some of Marie Curie's notebooks detailing her theories.