Marie Curie
Pioneered radioactivity
Polish-French physicist and chemist. First person ever to win two Nobel Prizes.
Studied in Paris on near-zero food, then with husband Pierre isolated polonium and radium by stirring tons of pitchblende in a leaky shed. Carried glowing test tubes in her pockets — her notebooks are still so radioactive a century later they're stored in lead-lined boxes.
Famous for
- Discovered polonium and radium
- Coined the term 'radioactivity'
- Nobel Prizes in Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911)
- Mobile X-ray units on WWI battlefields
In Rubicon
Marie Curie is one of the historical characters you can play as in Rubicon, a trivia game where you answer in your own words and an AI judge reads what you meant. Marie Curie is filed under Natural Sciences, and is strongest at Natural Sciences and Human Body & Medicine.
Others in Natural Sciences
- Isaac Newton — Laws of motion + calculus
- Pythagoras — The Pythagorean theorem
- Euclid — Father of geometry
- Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi — Founder of algebra
- Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) — Optics + the scientific method
- Hypatia of Alexandria — Alexandria's last great scholar