Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie by Barbara Goldsmith
This biography is about Polish-born French scientist Marie Curie, also well-known to us as ‘Madame Curie’ . As is well known, she discovered two new radioactive substances, named polonium and radium, physically, and isolated pure radium chemically. With these achievements, she won two Nobel Prizes for physics and chemistry, respectively. Her husband Pierre Curie, her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie, and her son-in-law Frederic Joliot-Curie were also exceptional scientists and each won Nobel Prizes. As a Korean, the fact that one family won five Nobel Prizes for science doesn’t seem realistic at all. What a great family! Besides her scientific achievement, this book deals with private and humane sides of her life: Her love life, scandal with Paul Langevin (both a physicist and a brilliant mathematician), competition with other leading scientists of her time, and her illnesses (recurrent depression, tuberculosis, and aplastic pernicious anemia which was her cause of death). However, after I ...