The world's first female professor was Madame Curie.
She was born on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw, Poland (which was under Russian rule at the time). As a teenager, Marie was extremely intelligent and graduated from high school with a gold medal. Since women were not allowed to go to university at that time, Marie had to work as a governess, and in 1891 she came to France and enrolled at the University of Paris.
Marie worked very hard and earned a master's degree in physics two years after enrolling, and a master's degree in mathematics in the third year.
In 1895, Marie married Pierre Curie, a French physicist, and from then on, Mr. and Mrs. Curie marched side by side on the journey of science. After three years of hard work, Mr. and Mrs. Curie first discovered and refined radium. At that time, the result of their experiments was that radium's rays were 255 times stronger than uranium's and could pass through steel, stone, wood and other well-organized substances. This discovery stirred up the whole world and unraveled the mystery of radioactivity. At the same time they discovered radium, they also discovered the radioactive element polonium.
But unfortunately, on the evening of April 19, 1906, Curie died in a traffic accident, and Madame Curie was devastated.
After Curie's death, the French government decided to use the pension to support Marie and her two daughters, but she declined. Since then, Mrs. Curie took on the responsibility of raising her two daughters while continuing to engage in research experiments; at the same time, she also took over her husband's work and became the first female professor.
In 1907, Madame Curie refined pure radium chloride, accurately measured its atomic weight, and published her famous book On Radioactivity.
Madame Curie had a noble heart. At the time of her discovery of radium, she thought that radium was a medical substance, and that patenting it would be detrimental to the majority of patients and thus contrary to the principles of science. Therefore, she gave up the patent and persuaded her husband to publicize all the methods of refining radium. After Curie's death, she gave the radium she had extracted to laboratories for the treatment of cancer. The radium was worth more than a million francs, and it was suggested that the property should go to her children, but she declined, believing that her daughters should fight for themselves.
On July 4, 1934, Madame Curie died. During her life, she left more than 70 scientific works to her people. She will always be a scientist admired by people all over the world, and her great contribution to mankind in scientific progress, as well as her simple and selfless style and noble personality will always be praised by the world.