 Marie Curie

A physicist and chemist whose investigation of radioactivity joined sensitive measurement to chemical separation. She moved from Warsaw to Paris to study, later becoming a professor of physics. The Curie ionization-current measurement shows the experimental craft behind the work: balancing a tiny electric current against a calibrated electric charge. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics and received the 1911 prize in chemistry.^[ref]

Marie Curie refers to Marie Curie (1867–1934), a pioneering physicist and chemist known for her groundbreaking research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields: Physics (1903, which she shared with her husband Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel) and Chemistry (1911).

Like all big names in science, she was at the right place at the right time and with the right interest and passion.

Notably, the man she married, Pierre Curie, happened to be a the world master at precisely the technique that she needed to carefully measure radioactivity: he had the most precise electrometers in the world, which allowed to detect small amounts of radioactivity via the ionization of air by radiation . These used piezoelectricity, which Pierre Curie co-discovered with his brother.