Marie Sklodowska Curie was born in Warsaw, Poland, on November 7, 1867, the youngest of five children of Wladislaw and Bronislava Boguska Sklodowska. Her mother, Bronislawa Boguska, was a pianist, singer, and teacher (Moore, 2005). Her father, Wladyslaw Sklodowski, was a professor of mathematics and physics. When she was little, her family nickname was “Little Manya” (Moore, 2005). After her father lost his job, the family struggled and was forced to take borders (renters) into their small apartment. Religious as a child, Curie rejected her faith after her sister died of typhus (a severe fever) in 1876 (Moore, 2005). Two years later, she lost her mother to tuberculosis, a terrible disease that attacks the lungs and bones.
Education
From childhood, …show more content…
A prodigy in both literature and math, as a teenager Marie attended a secret school called the “Floating University”—its locale changed regularly to avoid detection by the Russians—which taught physics and natural history as well as the forbidden subjects of Polish history and culture (Science in Poland). Because her father, a teacher of mathematics and physics, lost his savings through bad investment, she had to take work as a teacher and, at the same time, took part clandestinely in the nationalist "free university," reading in Polish to women workers. As girls could not attend universities in Russian-dominated Poland, Marie spent a year in the country with friends at her father's suggestion. Upon returning to her father's house in Warsaw the next summer, she began to earn her living through private tutoring. Her father, a science teacher, encouraged his daughter’s curiosity but could not afford to send her to college. At the age of 18, she took a post as governess, where she suffered an unhappy love affair. From her earnings, she was able to finance her sister …show more content…
There she met physicists who were already well known--Jean Perrin, Charles Maurain, and Aimé Cotton (Science in Poland). Sklodowska worked far into the night in her students'-quarter garret and virtually lived on bread and butter and tea. She came first in the license of physical sciences in 1893. She began to work in Lippmann's research laboratory and in 1894 was placed second in the license of mathematical sciences (Smithsonian, 2011). By mid-1897 Curie's scientific achievements were two university degrees, a fellowship (a scholarship), and a monograph (published paper) on the magnetization of tempered steel. In 1903, Curie became the first woman in France to earn a PhD in physics (Smithsonian, 2011). Professors who reviewed her doctoral thesis, which was about radiation, declared that it was the greatest single contribution to science ever