Marie and Pierre Curie with their daughter Irene Curie (born 1897, later Irene Joliot-Curie). Marie Curie (1867-1934, nee Marya Sklodowska), was born in Poland. In 1891 she became a student at the Sorbonne university in Paris, France. There she met and married the French physicist Pierre Curie (1859-1906). They isolated the radioactive elements polonium and radium in 1898. Marie and Pierre won shares of the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics, and Marie won the 1911 Nobel Prize for Chemistry (Pierre died in an accident in 1906). Photograph by H. C. Ellis in the Curies' garden in Paris, during the period 1900-6, when Marie taught at the Sevres Higher Normal School for Girls.