Who shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Marie and Pierre Curie?

Antoine Henri Becquerel shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Marie Curie and Pierre Curie. The prize recognized their joint investigations of the radiation phenomena that Becquerel had discovered in uranium.

Becquerel, a French physicist from a family of scientists, reported in 1896 that uranium salts emitted penetrating radiation without being exposed to sunlight. Marie Curie later studied the phenomenon systematically, and she and Pierre Curie discovered that other substances could also be radioactive. Their research led to the discovery of polonium and radium and helped establish radioactivity as an atomic property.

The 1903 prize was divided: Becquerel received one half, while Marie and Pierre Curie shared the other half. It was an important milestone for Marie Curie, who became the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize. A frequent mistake is to select Ernest Rutherford, Wilhelm Röntgen, or Niels Bohr; all were major physicists associated with radiation or atomic theory, but none shared this particular Nobel Prize. The SI unit of radioactivity, the becquerel, was later named in Becquerel's honor.