The famous Polish scientist will be honoured outside her homeland as well, notably in France, where she spent most of her life. A gala inauguration of the Year at the Sorbonne in Paris, on 29 January, is to be attended by President Nikolas Sarkozy.
Born in Warsaw in 1867, she graduated from the Sorbonne. In 1903 she wrote a dissertation which became the first doctorate in science awarded to a woman in Europe.
In the same year, she was awarded, together with her husband, Pierre Curie, and Henri Becquerel, the Nobel Prize in Physics.
In 1906 her husband was killed in an accident. In 1911 she was awarded a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry. She devised a method to isolate radium and study its properties, a discovery which later paved the way for cancer therapy.
Skłodowska-Curie was a global celebrity but scandal erupted when news of her affair with a married scientist, Paul Langevin, emerged in the press, prompting angry protesters outside her home and unpleasant newspaper coverage.
During World War I, together with her daughter Irene, she fitted ambulances with portable X ray equipment, driving vehicles to the front line. She died in 1934 of leukemia, which is supposed to have been caused by her high exposure to radiation.
Last year, Maria Skłodowska-Curie was named ‘the most inspirational female scientist’ in an online poll by the prestigious British weekly ‘New Scientist’. She received 25.1 percent of the votes, ahead of Rosalind Franklin, the British chemist (14.2 percent) and Hypatia of Alexandria, the fourth-century mathematician (9.4 percent).
She is also the only Pole in the list of twenty five most influential women of the twentieth century compiled by the Time magazine last year.
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