Marie Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize when she received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Curie shared the physics prize with her husband, Pierre Curie, and physicist Henri Becquerel. The award recognized their work on radiation, including Becquerel’s discovery of spontaneous radioactivity and the Curies’ investigations into radioactive materials.
Marie Curie later won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering the elements polonium and radium and for studying their properties. She remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields: physics and chemistry.
Her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie also became a Nobel laureate, winning the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with her husband, Frédéric Joliot-Curie. A common mix-up is to credit Marie Curie’s first Nobel only to radioactivity in general; the official 1903 award was specifically in physics and was shared among three scientists.