Marie Curie discovered two new chemical elements: polonium and radium. She identified polonium in 1898, naming it after her native country, Poland, and later that year, she and her husband Pierre Curie discovered radium, named after the Latin word for "ray"
. Her work began with studying the radioactivity of uranium minerals, particularly pitchblende, which was found to be more radioactive than uranium itself. This led her to hypothesize the presence of other, more radioactive elements within the mineral. After extensive chemical separation and analysis, the Curies isolated polonium and radium, both highly radioactive elements
. Marie Curie's research fundamentally changed the understanding of radioactivity, a term she coined, and paved the way for advances in physics and medicine. She also won two Nobel Prizes: the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel) for their work on radioactivity, and the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of radium and polonium
