A woman of courage and clear vision, Marie Sklodowska Curie (1867–1934) was born on this day in Warsaw, Poland. She left home to study in Paris, where she met and married physics professor Pierre Curie.

“Each of us must work for our own improvement… share a general responsibility for all humanity,” Madame Curie affirmed. “Our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.”

Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize—and the first person to win two—physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911. She isolated the radioactive elements polonium and radium, coined the term radioactivity, and helped deploy mobile x-ray units that examined wounded soldiers in World War I.

“I was taught that the way of progress is neither swift nor easy,” she said, always hoping discovery would serve goodness.

“All my life through, the new sights of nature made me rejoice like a child,” Curie explained. The first female professor at the Sorbonne, she founded the world-famous Radium Institute in Paris.

“I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done,” said the woman who drove bravely to the war front to operate and repair her x-ray machines.

“Life is not easy for any of us,” she believed. “But what of that? We must have perseverance and, above all, confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.”

Upon her death, Albert Einstein said, “Marie Curie is, of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted.” Her light still reminds us: understanding dissolves fear.