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The girl who became Marie Curie was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1867. Her name then was Maria. Her parents were both teachers, and they loved learning. Maria loved it too. She was a very good student, and she always wanted to know more.
But in Warsaw at that time, women could not study at the university. At seventeen, Maria started to work as a governess, a teacher in a rich family's house. She did this job for six years. In her free time, she read science books and studied alone.
At twenty-four, Maria moved to Paris and began to study at the Sorbonne, a famous university. She had very little money, but she studied for many hours every day. In Paris, people started to call her Marie.
In Paris, she met a scientist called Pierre Curie. They got married, and they worked together in a laboratory. Together, they discovered two new elements: polonium and radium.
In 1903, Marie shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with two other scientists. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. In 1911, she won a second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry, for isolating pure radium. Even today, she is the only person in history to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences.
The girl who could not go to university in Warsaw changed science forever. Her work helped people understand radioactivity, and it started a new way to use radiation in medicine. Her story says something simple: never stop learning.
