According to Britain’s BBC poll on Thursday, Marie Skłodowska-Curie was the most influential woman in history due to her role in curing cancer, as a pioneering researcher on radioactivity.
Readers of BBC History magazine ranked Polish-born Curie at the top of a list of 100 women who changed the world.
The U.S. civil rights activist Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on a bus for a white person, came second in the poll, followed by Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the British suffragette movement, who helped women win the right to vote.
Maria Skłodowska-Curie was born in Warsaw as Maria Salomea Skłodowska on 7 November 1867 and died on 4 July 1934. She was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to win twice, the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences. She was also the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris. She was married to Pierre Curie,a French physicist, a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity and radioactivity. She was part of Curie family which has legacy of five Nobel Prizes.
Source: Reuters, news.trust.org, Wikipedia, Independent
Photo: Wikipedia