Today, Google celebrates with a doodle the 144th birthday of Marie Skłodowska Curie, the Polish–French physicist–chemist famous for her pioneering research on radioactivity.

Curie was the first person honored with two Nobel Prizes—in physics and chemistry. She was the first female professor at the University of Paris. She was the first woman to be entombed on her own merits (in 1995) in the Paris Panthéon.

In 1903 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Pierre Curie, Marie Curie and Henri Becquerel the Nobel Prize in Physics, "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel."
Skłodowska–Curie and her husband were unable to go to Stockholm to receive the prize in person, but they shared its financial proceeds with needy acquaintances, including students.

On receiving the Nobel Prize, Marie and Pierre Curie suddenly became very famous. The Sorbonne gave Pierre a professorship and permitted him to establish his own laboratory, in which Skłodowska–Curie became the director of research.

In 1897 and 1904, respectively, Skłodowska–Curie gave birth to their daughters, Irène and Eve Curie. She later hired Polish governesses to teach her daughters her native language, and sent or took them on visits to Poland.

Skłodowska–Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize. Eight years later, she would receive the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, "in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element."

A month after accepting her 1911 Nobel Prize, she was hospitalized with depression and a kidney ailment.

Skłodowska–Curie was the first person to win or share two Nobel Prizes. She is one of only two people who have been awarded a Nobel Prize in two different fields, the other person being Linus Pauling (for chemistry and for peace). Nevertheless, in 1911 the French Academy of Sciences refused to abandon its prejudice against women, and she failed by two votes to be elected a member. Elected instead was Édouard Branly, an inventor who had helped Guglielmo Marconi develop the wireless telegraph. It would be a doctoral student of Skłodowska–Curie, Marguerite Perey, who would become the first woman elected to membership in the Academy – over half a century later, in 1962.
source: Marie Curie Wikipedia