Pierre Curie (1859)

Curie was a chemist who studied crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity, and radioactivity. He and his wife Marie worked to isolate polonium and radium and were the first to use the term “radioactivity,” pioneering its study. He and one of his students discovered nuclear energy by identifying the continuous emission of heat from radium particles. Pierre and Marie were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. More…