Who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physics?

The first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physics was Maria Sklodowska-Curie, better known as Marie Curie, in 1903.

Born in Warsaw in 1867, she moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, where she met physicist Pierre Curie. Together, they investigated radioactivity after Henri Becquerel’s 1896 discovery that uranium emitted spontaneous radiation. The 1903 Physics Prize was shared by Henri Becquerel, Pierre Curie, and Marie Curie; Marie received one-quarter of the prize.

The Curies’ research helped establish radioactivity as a major field of science and contributed to the discovery of the elements polonium and radium. “Sklodowska” was Marie’s birth surname, while “Curie” was her married surname, so the stored answer identifies the same person as the commonly used answer, Marie Curie.

Curie later became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes: she received the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on radium and polonium. She remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields.