A Polish-born scientist noted for her work on ionizing radiation. Taught by her father, she was not accepted by Warsaw University but at the age of 24 she instead went to study in Paris. There she married Pierre Curie (1859–1906) four years later. Together they discovered radium and polonium. They extracted less than a gram of radium from eight tonnes of pitchblende, which was noted for its high radioactivity. In 1903, together with Henri Becquerel, the Curies received the Nobel Prize for Physics. However, Pierre was killed in a street accident three years later. She took his place as professor of physics at the Sorbonne, and in 1911 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, becoming the only woman to receive two Nobel prizes, and for different sciences.