Radiating Genius - Being Marie
- prateetisengupta
- Nov 17, 2018
- 3 min read
The life and works of Maria Sklodowska, better known as Marie Curie, are an inspiration to women of all ages, transcending the barriers of time and place.
Madame Curie’s efforts, with her husband Pierre Curie, led to the discovery of polonium and radium and, after Pierre's death, the further development of X-rays. Their groundbreaking work on radioactivity was one of the major steps towards the development of Quantum Mechanics, without which none of the modern technological feats that the human race has performed since the 1920-s would have been possible.
Marie was born in 1867 (around 52 years after Ada Lovelace). Just as Ada was denied access to the Royal Society Library because she was a woman, Marie could not attend the all-male Warsaw University, although she was a brilliant student in her secondary school. Undeterred, she continued her education in Warsaw's "floating university," a set of underground, informal classes held in secret, studied physics, chemistry and mathematics on her own, and in 1891, finally made her way to Paris where she enrolled at the Sorbonne University.
The rest, of course, is history. She won 2 Nobel Prizes (Physics in 1903 along with her husband Pierre and Henri Becqerel, and Chemistry in 1911). During World War I Marie championed the use of portable X-Ray machines in the field which saved the lives of many wounded men, and, in her own words, “also saved many from long suffering and lasting infirmity”. After the war, she traveled to the United States twice— in 1921 and in 1929— to raise funds to buy radium and to establish a radium research institute in Warsaw. (Ref. mini-bio link below.)
But unfortunately, Marie’s achievements seem to have been equaled by very few women the world over. She remains to this day, the only woman to have won multiple Nobel Prizes. Her daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935, making the two the only mother-daughter pair to have won Nobel Prizes.
Awards and recognition apart, it is an established fact that women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) are still a minority community. As recently as 2013, US President Barack Obama expressed concern that “half the population … is way underrepresented in those fields and that means that we’ve got a whole bunch of talent…not being encouraged the way they need to.” (Ref. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy website.)
In 1991, being an Arts graduate, there was no way I could have gained admission to any engineering college in India to study Electronics or Computer Science. So after acquiring my post graduate degree in English Literature I studied the basics of computers and software development at NIIT.
Which was just as well, because when I started my career as a programmer, I learned from my manager that the best way to find out how computers work is to ‘take them apart’. Well, that’s what I did. Literally.
But I have been fortunate enough to have worked with some brilliant engineers from all the major IITs throughout my career and I am blessed by the fact that I have learned so much in the process. And when I came to know recently from quite a few of them, that the learning has been mutual, it was an unexpected bonus.
So, if it was madness on my part to have selected computers and software engineering as a career, there was some method in it!
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