CURIE, PIERRE (1859-1906) and MARIE French physicists. Pierre Curie was born in Paris on May 15, and educated at the Sorbonne, where he later became professor of physics. His early researches were on piezoelectricity, the magnetic properties of bodies at different temperatures and other topics. He was chiefly known for his work on radio-activity carried out jointly with his wife, Marie Sklodowska, to whom he was married in 1895. Marie Sklodowska was born in Warsaw on Nov. 7, 1867, and received her early scientific training from her father, Dr. Sklodowski. She became involved in the students' revolutionary organization and found it advisable to leave War saw. Mlle. Sklodowska went first to Cracow, then under Austrian rule, and later to Paris, where she took a science degree at the university.
After the discovery of the radio-active properties of uranium by Henri Becquerel in 1896 M. and Mme. Curie began their re searches into radio-activity (q.v.) and in 1898 obtained polonium and radium from pitchblende which they had subjected to a very laborious process of fractionation. In subsequent years they did much to elucidate the properties of radium and its trans formation products. In 1903 they were awarded the Davy medal of the Royal Society and in the same year the Nobel prize for physics was divided between them and Henri Becquerel. The same year Mme. Curie submitted the results of her researches in her doctorate thesis presented to the university. She then became chef de travaux in the laboratory at the department of the Sor bonne created for her husband. Prof. Curie, who was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1905, was run over by a dray and killed instantly in Paris on April 19, 1906. His widow succeeded him as professor at the Paris university and in 1911 was awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry. Her classic Traite de Radioacti vite was published in 1910. Mme. Curie did much to help the establishment of the radio-activity laboratory in her native city. In 1921 President Harding, on behalf of the women of the United States, presented her with a gramme of radium in recognition of her services to science. On a second visit to the United States, in 1929, Mme. Curie received from the hands of President Hoover a gift of $5o,000 from American friends of science to purchase radium for the use of the laboratory in Warsaw.