Thank you Google

Women in science are seldom remembered so thanks to Google for bringing this remarkable woman to our attention.

As anyone who attended a high school science class is aware, Curie and her husband Pierre are credited with the discovery of radium and polonium. Her work landed her two Nobel Prizes, one for physics in 1903 and another for chemistry in 1911.

Curie was born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw, Poland in 1867. By age 11, she had lost her oldest sister to typhus and her mother to tuberculosis. Nonetheless, she graduated high school at age 15 but soon came down with a nervous disorder that was likely depression, according to the American Institute of Physics. She recuperated in the country for a year before returning to Warsaw and attending a "floating university" with her sister Bronya. It was illegal for women to attend universities in Warsaw at the time, so these classes met in secret at locations that changed regularly.

The sisters wanted to expand their studies in Paris, however, so Marie agreed to work and pay for her sister's classes and her sister did the same for Marie after she graduated. Marie made it to Paris just before she turned 24. She eventually earned a grant from the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry to study the magnetic properties of different steels, AIP said, and that led her to the lab of Pierre Curie.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2395956,00.asp#fbid=O8iD1OutNPv

WOW!  And those OWS mostly think getting an education is hard today - they should get their noses rubbed in what women have struggled with through the ages.