Physicist and chemist; pioneer of radioactivity, two-time Nobel laureate.
1867–1934 · Paris, France
Install Marie's frameworks in Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add adamtpang/summon.guide
/plugin install marie-curieInstalls 4 skills from Marie, plus the rest of summon.guide. Source on GitHub.
Maria Salomea Skłodowska was born on 7 November 1867 in Warsaw, then part of Congress Poland under Russian rule, the youngest of five children in a family of teachers. Her father, Władysław Skłodowski, taught physics and mathematics, and her mother, Bronisława, ran a girls' boarding school; the family's Polish patriotism and financial hardship shaped a childhood marked by both learning and loss. Barred as a woman from Poland's formal universities, she attended the clandestine, movable 'Flying University' in Warsaw and worked for several years as a governess to fund her sister Bronisława's medical studies in Paris, on a reciprocal pact by which Bronisława would later support her in turn.
In 1891 Skłodowska moved to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne, earning a licence in physics in 1893 (ranked first in her class) and one in mathematics in 1894. She met the physicist Pierre Curie, whom she married in a civil ceremony in 1895, and together they turned to the study of the rays recently observed by Henri Becquerel. Replacing Becquerel's fogged photographic plates with a sensitive piezoelectric-quartz electrometer, she measured radiation as an electric current and showed the effect to be an atomic property — coining the term 'radioactivity.' Finding that the mineral pitchblende was far more active than its uranium content could explain, she inferred, and then chased through fraction-by-fraction chemical separation, two previously unknown elements: polonium (named for her occupied homeland, Poland) and radium, both announced in 1898. Over roughly four years the Curies processed several tons of pitchblende residue by hand to isolate a decigram of pure radium chloride and determine radium's atomic weight, work that earned Marie her 1903 doctorate. That same year she, Pierre, and Becquerel shared the Nobel Prize in Physics, making her the first woman to receive a Nobel. The Curies declined to patent the radium-isolation process, publishing it freely so that radium — and the new medicine of radiotherapy — could be produced by anyone. After Pierre was killed in a Paris street accident in 1906, Marie took over his chair at the Sorbonne, becoming the first woman to hold a professorship there. In 1911 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for the discovery of radium and polonium and the isolation and study of radium, becoming the first person to win two Nobel Prizes and the only person to win them in two distinct sciences. She directed the newly founded Radium Institute in Paris, and during the First World War she organized France's first military radiology service, equipping and often personally driving mobile X-ray units — the 'petites Curies' — to the front. She continued to lead the Radium Institute until her death.
Marie Curie died on 4 July 1934 of aplastic anaemia, a blood disease attributed to her decades of unprotected exposure to ionizing radiation; her notebooks remain radioactive to this day. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win two, and the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, and her work established radioactivity as a field, opened the way to nuclear physics, and gave medicine the tools of radiotherapy and diagnostic radiology. Reserved, intensely private, and indifferent to wealth and celebrity, she came to embody the ideal of the disinterested scientist working for humanity rather than profit. In 1995 she became the first woman interred in the Panthéon in Paris on the strength of her own achievements, her remains sealed in a lead-lined coffin because of their radioactivity. The Radium Institute she founded endures as the Institut Curie, and her elder daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, went on to share a Nobel Prize of her own, extending a scientific legacy that made 'Curie' synonymous with rigor, endurance, and discovery.
Frameworks distilled from Marie’s life, packaged as Claude Code skills. Each skill is invoked with a slash command and grounded in the primary biographies listed under References.
/marie-curie:marie-curieUnderstand rather than fear — measure it, grind it, weigh it, give it away.
Source: Marie Curie, Pierre Curie (1923) and Autobiographical Notes; her 1903 doctoral thesis Recherches sur les substances radioactives; and Ève Curie, Madame Curie: A Biography (1937).
/marie-curie:the-isolation-methodTurn an intractable question into a relentless, well-instrumented physical process — and grind it, measuring every batch, until the thing is in your hand and can be weighed.
Source: Marie Curie's isolation of radium (1898–1902); her doctoral thesis Recherches sur les substances radioactives (1903); Ève Curie, Madame Curie: A Biography (1937). — Isolation of ~0.1 g pure radium chloride from several tons of pitchblende via the piezoelectric-quartz electrometer and fractional crystallization; radium-isolation method published without patent.
/marie-curie:nothing-to-be-fearedConvert fear into understanding, then into the next small step.
Source: Theme most associated with Marie Curie ('Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood...'), grounded in her verified method and life; see Ève Curie, Madame Curie: A Biography (1937). — On fear, understanding, and endurance
/marie-curie:science-not-selfKeep ego, credit, and money from corrupting the work — optimize for the truth, not your standing.
Source: Marie Curie's and Pierre's deliberate refusal to patent the radium-isolation process (published freely so any lab could produce radium), her recorded reasoning that radium 'belongs to all people,' and her documented indifference to fame and money through the 1911 press scandal. — Marie Curie, letter to her brother Józef (1894); Ève Curie, Madame Curie: A Biography (1937).
Install in Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add adamtpang/summon.guide
/plugin install marie-curieBring Marie’s frameworks into your terminal. One install registers every guide’s skills.
“Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves.”
“One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.”
“Life is not easy for any of us. 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, at whatever cost, must be attained.”
“I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.”
“You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for his own improvement and, at the same time, share a general responsibility for all humanity.”
“I am working in the laboratory all day long, it is all I can do: I am better off there than anywhere else.”
“There is nothing in this but pure science... I believe there is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life.”
Their voice on summon.guide is grounded in:
Further reading: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie
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