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50 free Marie Curie trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Marie Curie trivia quiz covers the Polish-born physicist and chemist who coined the word radioactivity, discovered two elements in a leaky Paris shed, and became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only person to win in two different sciences. The easy questions cover the landmarks: her birthplace, her husband, the two elements, the two prizes and the unit and element that bear her name. From there the quiz moves through the Flying University, the governess years, the pitchblende, the 1906 accident on the Rue Dauphine, the Langevin scandal and the Radium Institute. The harder half is for readers of Ève Curie's biography: the mathematician who nearly married her, the electrometer, the tonne of ore that yielded a tenth of a gram of radium chloride, the Little Curies of the First World War, the gram of radium from President Harding, the Academy vote she lost by a whisker, the radioactive cookbooks and the lead-lined coffin in the Panthéon. Every answer was checked against Marie Curie's encyclopaedia entry before publishing. If you enjoy this, try our Nobel Prize, chemistry and famous scientists quizzes next.
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Q 01Marie Curie was the youngest of how many children born to teachers Bronisława and Władysław Skłodowski?
Five
Her father taught maths and physics and, after Russian authorities banned lab classes, brought the equipment home to teach his children.
Q 02What was Curie's maiden name?
Skłodowska
She used both surnames throughout her life and never lost her sense of Polish identity.
Q 03Curie was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes. In which two fields?
Physics and Chemistry
She remains the only person to win in two different sciences; Linus Pauling is the only other double laureate in two fields.
Q 04Which two elements did Marie and Pierre Curie discover in 1898?
Polonium and radium
They also coined the word 'radioactivity' in the course of the work.
Q 05Polonium was named in honour of what?
Curie's native Poland
Poland would remain partitioned among Russia, Austria and Prussia for another twenty years.
Q 06Radium takes its name from the Latin word for what?
Ray
The Curies announced it on 26 December 1898, five months after polonium.
Q 07Whose discovery that uranium salts emitted penetrating rays set Curie on her thesis topic?
Henri Becquerel
Becquerel shared the 1903 Physics Nobel with the Curies; Röntgen's X-rays a year earlier had been the other spur.
Q 08Which sensitive instrument, developed by Pierre Curie and his brother, did Marie use to measure uranium's activity?
An electrometer
Her key early finding was that activity depended only on the amount of uranium present, hinting it came from the atom itself.
Q 09Which uranium ore, four times as active as uranium itself, led Curie to suspect an unknown element?
Pitchblende
Torbernite, also called chalcolite, was twice as active; the Curies eventually processed tonnes of ore.
Q 10From a tonne of ore, how much radium chloride did the Curies manage to isolate by 1902?
One-tenth of a gram
Radium is chemically close to barium, which made the differential crystallisation arduous; pure radium metal followed in 1910.
Q 11Where did the Curies carry out most of their radium research?
A converted shed next to ESPCI
The former dissecting room was badly ventilated and not even waterproof, and they worked without protection.
Q 12Curie's early higher education in Warsaw came through which clandestine institution that admitted women?
The Flying University
She could not enrol at a regular university because she was a woman.
Q 13While working as a governess to fund her sister's studies, Curie fell in love with which future mathematician?
Kazimierz Żorawski
Q 21Curie's 1911 election bid to the French Academy of Sciences failed narrowly to which inventor?
Édouard Branly
Branly had helped Marconi develop wireless telegraphy; no woman was elected until her student Marguerite Perey in 1962.
Q 22Curie's affair with which physicist, a former student of Pierre's, caused a press scandal in 1911?
Paul Langevin
Tabloids painted her as a foreign home-wrecker; the Nobel committee chair tried to stop her attending the Chemistry ceremony.
Q 23Which Nobel committee chair tried to dissuade Curie from attending her 1911 ceremony over the scandal?
Svante Arrhenius
His parents rejected the penniless relative; as an old professor he would sit before her statue outside the Radium Institute she founded in her homeland.
Q 14Curie's cousin Józef Boguski, who ran the Warsaw lab where she first trained, had assisted which chemist?
Dmitri Mendeleev
The laboratory was at the Museum of Industry and Agriculture near the Old Town.
Q 15In which year did Marie leave Poland to study in Paris?
1891
She rented a garret in the Latin Quarter, sometimes forgot to eat, and wore all her clothes at once to keep warm.
Q 16Curie's first commissioned scientific work in Paris investigated the magnetic properties of what?
Various steels
The Society for the Encouragement of National Industry funded it, and her search for lab space led her to Pierre.
Q 17Marie and Pierre married in July 1895 in Sceaux. What did she wear instead of a bridal gown?
A dark blue outfit she later used in the lab
Neither wanted a religious service; their shared pastimes were long bicycle trips and travel.
Q 18Curie's 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics was shared with Pierre and which other scientist?
Henri Becquerel
The committee had meant to honour only the men until Swedish mathematician Magnus Gösta Mittag-Leffler tipped Pierre off.
Q 19Pierre Curie died in April 1906 how?
Struck by a horse-drawn vehicle in the rain
It happened on the Rue Dauphine; the University of Paris then gave Marie his chair, making her its first woman professor.
Q 20In 1906 Curie became the first woman to hold what post?
Professor at the University of Paris
The Academy of Sciences rejected her by one or two votes in 1911, electing a wireless-telegraph inventor instead.
She replied that there was 'no relation between her scientific work and the facts of her private life'.
Q 24During the First World War Curie developed mobile X-ray units. What were they nicknamed?
Petites Curies
She trained in radiology, anatomy and car mechanics, and about a million wounded soldiers were treated with her units.
Q 25Which teenage relative helped Curie run the wartime radiology units at first?
Her daughter Irène
Irène was 17; she and her husband later won their own Nobel Prize.
Q 26What did the French National Bank refuse to accept from Curie when war broke out?
Her gold Nobel medals
She bought war bonds with her Nobel money instead, expecting it would probably be lost.
Q 27Curie's 'radium emanation' needles used a gas later identified as what?
Radon
She used them to sterilise infected tissue, drawing on her own one-gram supply of radium.
Q 28Which US president presented Curie with a gram of radium at the White House in 1921?
Warren G. Harding
Journalist Marie Mattingly Meloney had raised the money through a Marie Curie Radium Fund.
Q 29Which French decoration did Curie refuse, both in 1909 and again before her 1921 US trip?
The Legion of Honour
The government was embarrassed she had no French distinction to wear abroad; she and Pierre often turned down medals.
Q 30How many further Nobel laureates did the Radium Institute produce under Curie's leadership?
Four
Two of them were members of her own family; the lab ranked with the Cavendish, Vienna's Radium Institute and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry.