Marie Curie

Born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1867, under Russian rule that barred women from higher education in Poland, she studied in secret at an underground "Flying University" before eventually saving enough, and receiving support from her sister, to move to Paris and enroll at the Sorbonne. She lived in poverty as a student, often surviving on little more than bread and tea, while completing degrees in physics and mathematics, graduating at the top of her class despite arriving barely able to speak French.

Working with her husband Pierre Curie in a converted shed with primitive equipment, Marie Curie discovered the elements polonium and radium and coined the term "radioactivity" for the phenomenon she was investigating. The physical toll of this work, handling radioactive material with no understanding yet of its dangers, would eventually contribute to her death, but at the time it produced findings that reshaped physics and chemistry. In 1906, Pierre was killed in a street accident, leaving Marie a widow with two young daughters and a laboratory to run alone, which she did, taking over his teaching position at the Sorbonne, the first woman ever to hold it.

Curie became the first person ever to win two Nobel Prizes, in Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911, and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. During the First World War she personally developed mobile X-ray units, later called "petites Curies," and drove them to the front lines herself to help treat wounded soldiers. She died in 1934 of aplastic anemia, a condition almost certainly caused by decades of unprotected exposure to the radioactive materials she had devoted her life to understanding.

Curie's life shows what happens when rigorous curiosity is paired with an almost total disregard for the barriers, financial, national, and gendered, placed in front of her. She didn't just endure exclusion from formal institutions, she built her way past it, then spent the rest of her life putting that knowledge directly to use for others, including on the battlefield. For young people, her insistence that things are to be understood rather than feared is a genuinely useful stance toward any daunting, unfamiliar problem worth solving.