In 1903, Marie Skłodowska Curie became the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize in Physics was divided so that Henri Becquerel received half for discovering spontaneous radioactivity, while Pierre and Marie Curie shared the other half for their joint research on the radiation phenomena he had discovered. Nobel Prize’s historical account of the award also records why the Curies did not travel to Stockholm that December: teaching obligations kept them in Paris, and Marie had been ill and had not fully recovered.
The prize was therefore not divided equally three ways. Becquerel received one-half, while Pierre and Marie each received one-quarter. The Curies eventually travelled to Stockholm in June 1905, when Pierre delivered their Nobel lecture.
The discovery that made the prize inevitable
The chain began in 1896, when Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium salts could expose photographic plates even without the sunlight he had expected to need. Something invisible was coming from the uranium itself.
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Marie Curie, then pursuing doctoral research in Paris, decided to measure the phenomenon systematically. Her work used extremely sensitive electrical measurements, including apparatus connected to the piezoelectric techniques Pierre Curie and his brother Jacques had developed.
Her measurements showed that uranium was not unique. Thorium produced a similar effect, while pitchblende, an ore containing uranium, produced a signal far stronger than its known uranium content could explain.
That suggested the ore contained other, even more radioactive substances.
Tons of ore, a leaky shed, and two new elements
Marie and Pierre Curie obtained large quantities of pitchblende residue and worked under primitive laboratory conditions in an improvised shed in Paris. Separating tiny quantities of radioactive material from that mass of ore required repeated crushing, dissolving, filtering and crystallising.
In July 1898, Marie and Pierre announced evidence for a new element that they named polonium, after Marie’s native Poland. In December, working with chemist Gustave Bémont, they announced another new radioactive element: radium.
The chemical separation took years. By the time of Marie’s 1903 doctoral thesis, she had produced highly concentrated radium compounds from several tons of starting material. Her thesis on radioactive substances was defended in June 1903, only months before the Nobel Prize was awarded.
She was almost left off the prize
Marie’s place in the 1903 prize was not automatic. Nobel archives show that a proposal signed by several members of the French Academy of Sciences named Becquerel and Pierre Curie but omitted Marie. Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler learned of the situation and wrote privately to Pierre.
The surviving correspondence is more precise than a popular version of the story. Pierre did not write that he would refuse the Nobel Prize unless Marie was included. Instead, he told Mittag-Leffler that if he was seriously being considered, he very much wished to be considered together with Marie because their work on radioactive substances could not fairly be separated. Marie was ultimately included in the award.
Questions about overlooked experimental contributors did not end there. A Physics World examination of Chien-Shiung Wu’s Nobel record found that she received 23 nominations across ten separate years between 1958 and 1974, after her decisive experimental work on parity violation. Her case was different from Curie’s, but it remains another prominent example of how Nobel recognition can diverge from the history of a discovery.
What radioactivity meant in 1903
Radioactivity arrived at a moment when physicists were already discovering that the atom was more complicated than the old indivisible model suggested. J.J. Thomson’s identification of the electron in 1897 had already provided evidence that atoms contained smaller components.
Curie’s work pushed the upheaval in another direction. Her measurements indicated that radioactivity depended on the atom itself rather than on ordinary chemical arrangements between atoms. Nobel Prize’s account of Curie’s scientific contribution describes this as evidence that something was happening inside the atom.
That insight became part of the transformation of atomic physics that followed. Radioactive decay, transmutation and the emerging picture of internal atomic structure would soon overturn much of the nineteenth-century understanding of matter.
The second prize, and the physical cost
Pierre Curie was killed in 1906 after being struck by a horse-drawn vehicle on the Rue Dauphine in Paris. Marie succeeded him in his university position and became the first woman to hold a professorship at the Sorbonne.
In 1911, she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The official citation recognised her discovery of radium and polonium, the isolation of radium, and her study of the element’s nature and compounds. Nobel Prize’s Chemistry records also show why her achievement remains unique: Curie is still the only person to have received Nobel Prizes in two different scientific categories.
The work brought serious physical exposure. Curie and her colleagues handled radioactive materials before their dangers were understood, often without anything resembling modern shielding. Her surviving papers and laboratory materials remain radioactive enough to require precautions, and she died in 1934 from aplastic anaemia after decades spent working around ionising radiation.
The daughter who won her own Nobel
Irène Curie, Marie and Pierre’s elder daughter, was 17 when the First World War began. She soon assisted her mother with wartime radiography, helping operate and teach the use of X-ray equipment that allowed doctors to locate bullets and shrapnel in wounded soldiers.
In 1935, Irène and her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the synthesis of new radioactive elements, the achievement now known as artificial radioactivity. Marie had died the previous year.
Across those three award years, four members of the Curie-Joliot family became Nobel laureates: Pierre in 1903, Marie in 1903 and again in 1911, and Irène and Frédéric jointly in 1935. Nobel Prize describes the Curies as its most successful Nobel family.
A BBC Science Focus retrospective on women in science includes Curie among the women whose work helped reshape modern science.
The long tail of first women
Curie’s 1903 award made her both the first female Nobel laureate and the first woman to receive the Physics Prize. Progress after that was strikingly slow. Maria Goeppert Mayer became only the second female Physics laureate in 1963, sixty years later. Donna Strickland became the third in 2018. The Nobel Prize’s current Physics records list five female Physics laureates through the 2025 awards.
Ada Yonath became the first Israeli woman to receive a Nobel Prize when she shared the 2009 Chemistry award for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome. Yonath died on August 31, 2026, at the age of 87, according to the Weizmann Institute of Science, where she had carried out much of her research.
Her structural work also clarified how certain antibiotics interact with bacterial ribosomes. The Media Line’s account of her career notes that her research helped lay foundations for efforts to develop improved antibiotics and address antibiotic resistance.
Other fields have their own belated firsts. In July 2026, Hong Wang became the first woman from China to receive a Fields Medal, according to an NPR report carried by Georgia Public Broadcasting. In computing, ACM announced in February 2007 that Frances Allen was the first woman to receive the A.M. Turing Award, as recipient of the 2006 award for her foundational work on program optimisation. ACM-W’s profile of Allen records that milestone.
The chronology extends beyond science prizes. Business Insider’s year-by-year roster of Nobel Peace Prize laureates traces that award from its beginnings in 1901 through the modern era.
What the medal actually looked like
The medal Curie received belonged to the design used for the Physics and Chemistry prizes. Nobel Prize records show that the Swedish medals of that era were 66 millimetres in diameter and made of 23-carat gold. Nobel Prize’s history of the medals explains that this composition remained in use until 1980.
On the front was Alfred Nobel’s profile. The reverse of the Physics medal, designed by Erik Lindberg, depicts Nature as a goddess whose veil is lifted by the Genius of Science, an image unusually well suited to a prize awarded for making an invisible phenomenon measurable.
More than a century later, Curie’s work remains embedded in the language of radioactivity itself. One curie is defined as 37 billion nuclear disintegrations per second, a value historically tied to the activity of radium. What began with unexpectedly darkened photographic plates became a new way of understanding matter, and Marie Curie’s place in that history rests on more than being the first woman through the Nobel door: she helped reveal that the atom was not the quiet, indivisible object nineteenth-century physics had once imagined.