Marie Curie

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Term Paper Title	Marie Curie
# of Words	820
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	3.28

Marie Curie

Marie Curie

LIFE OF MARIE CURIE

     Marie Curie(1867-1934) was a French physicist with many accomplishments
in both physics and chemistry.  Marie and her husband Pierre, who was also a
French physicist, are both famous for their work in radioactivity.

     Marie Curie, originally named Marja Sklodowska, was born in Warsaw,
Poland on Nov.7, 1867.  Her first learning of physics came from her father who
taught it in high school.  Marie's father must have taught his daughter well
because in 1891, she went to Paris(where she changed her original name) and
enrolled in the Sorbonne.  Then two years later she passed the Examination for
her physics degree ranking in first place. She met Pierre Curie in 1894, and
married him in the next year.  Marie subsequently gave birth to two daughters
Irene(1897) and Eve(1904).

     Pierre Curie(1859-1906) obtained his doctorate in the year of his
marriage, but had already distinguished himself in the study of the properties
of crystals.  He discovered the phenomenon of piezoelectricity, whereby changes
in the volume of certain crystals excite small electric potentials.  He
discovered that the magnetic susceptibility of paramagnetic materials is
inversely proportional to the absolute temperature, and that there exists a
critical temperature above which the magnetic properties disappear, this is
called the Curie temperature.

     Marie Curie was interested in the recent discoveries of radiation, which
were made by Wilhelm Roentgen on the discovery of X-rays in 1895, and by Henri
Becquerel in 1896, when he discovered uranium gives off similar invisible
radiation as the X-rays.  Curie thus began studying uranium radiation and made
it her doctoral thesis.  With the aid of an electrometer built by Pierre, Marie
measured the strength of the radiation emitted form uranium compounds and found
it proportional to the uranium content, constant over a long period of time and
influenced by external conditions.  She detected a similar immutable radiation
in the compounds of thorium.  While checking these results, she made the
discovery that uranium pitchblende and the mineral chalcolite emitted four times
as much radiation as their uranium content.  She realized that unknown elements,
even more radioactive then uranium must be present.  Then in 1898 she drew the
revolutionary conclusion that pitchblende contains a small amount of an unknown
radiating element.

     Pierre Curie understood the importance of this supposition and joined
his wif...

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