French physicist and Nobel laureate, best known for his work on radioactivity with his wife, Marie Curie. Pierre Curie was born in Paris and educated at home by his parents. He then studied physics at the Sorbonne. His interest turned to crystallography and in 1877, with his brother Jacques, he discovered piezoelectricity. Curie taught physics at a number of institutions before being appointed Professor at the Sorbonne in 1904. Until the mid-1890s most of Curie’s research was on magnetism and on crystals.
In 1894 he met Marie Sklodowska at the Sorbonne and married her the following year. Her subsequent research followed up the discovery of X-rays in 1895 by Wilhelm Roentgen and the discovery by Antoine Becquerel in 1896 of the emission of similarly penetrating rays from uranium. She found that these latter rays were also produced by the uranium ore pitchblende, but in quantities too great to be accounted for by the uranium alone. To help his wife to isolate the element that must be producing the bulk of these rays, Pierre Curie gave up his own research. In the course of this work they discovered and named the radioactive elements polonium and radium. For this they jointly received, with Becquerel, the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903. They continued their joint work on radioactivity, but in 1906 Pierre Curie was killed in a road accident in Paris.
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