Marie Curie (Marya Sklodowska) [1885-1966]

She married the physicist Pierre Curie (1859-1906) in 1895 and soon began work on seeking radioactive elements other than uranium in pitchblende (to account for its unexpectedly high radioactivity). By 1898 she had discovered radium and polonium , although it took her four years to purify them. In 1903 the Curies shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Henri Becquerel, who had discovered radioactivity.