Marie Curie had two children, both daughters: Irène and Ève Curie.
Marie and Pierre Curie’s first daughter, Irène, was born in 1897. Their second daughter, Ève, was born in 1904, two years before Pierre’s accidental death. The family lived during an exceptionally demanding period in Marie’s career, when she was researching radioactivity and helping establish the scientific significance of radium and polonium.
Irène followed her parents into science. Working with her husband, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, she helped discover artificial radioactivity, and the pair received the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Ève took a different path: she became a writer, journalist, and concert pianist, and wrote a well-known biography of her mother.
A common mix-up is to count later descendants as Marie Curie’s children. Irène had children of her own, including physicist Hélène Langevin-Joliot, but Marie herself had only Irène and Ève. Both daughters also contributed to preserving and extending the Curie family’s scientific and cultural legacy.