Who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, awarded in 1903?

The first woman to win a Nobel Prize, awarded in 1903, was Marie Curie.

Curie shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband, Pierre Curie, and Henri Becquerel for research into radiation. Becquerel had discovered spontaneous radioactivity in uranium, while Marie and Pierre investigated the phenomenon further and identified the elements polonium and radium. Marie Curie also coined the term “radioactivity.”

She was born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw and moved to Paris for higher education. Her 1903 award made her the first female Nobel laureate. In 1911, she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on radium and polonium, making her the first person to receive two Nobel Prizes and the only person to win them in two separate scientific fields.

The question specifies the 1903 award because Curie’s later Nobel was in Chemistry. Irène Joliot-Curie, her daughter, won the 1935 Chemistry Nobel, but she was not the first woman laureate.