Today, Google is honoring two-time Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie with an artistic Doodle that invokes her era. In the Doodle, Curie sits at a table amidst her beakers and other lab equipment, with the Google logo faintly visible in the background.
Curie, or course, is one of the most famous scientists of all time – known mostly for her pioneering research on radioactivity. The Google Doodle honors her birth – November 7th, 1867, in Warsaw, Poland.
Curie’s theory of radioactivity, the isolation of radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of Polonium and Radium led her to win two Nobel Prizes. The first, in 1903, was for physics and was shared by her husband, Pierre Curie. In 1911, she was the sole winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
Her accomplishments are made more impressive by the fact that she was the first woman to even win the prize and is still the only woman to ever win the prize in two distinct fields.
In 1934, Curie died from aplastic anemia brought on by the constant exposure to radiation that she experienced through her work. In 1995, she was entombed in the Pantheon, Paris – the first woman to receive the honor. A symbol used to measure radioactivity, the curie (Ci), is named after her and she even has her own element on the periodic table (curium, atomic number 96).
She is usually thought of as one, if not the most influential woman in science.
Curie is the most recent in a line of science-related people honored with a Google Doodle. Already this year, Google has paid tribute to geneticist Gregor Mendel, mathematician Pierre de Fermat, and Vitamin C discoverer Albert Szent-Gyorgyi.
What do you think of today’s Google Doodle? Let us know in the comments.