Special card for Maria Skłodowska-Curie
Published 11 May 2011
Last modified 3 June 2019
More than thousand passengers have already purchased the personalized Warsaw City Card with the pattern prepared specially on the occasion of the Maria Skłodowska-Curie Year and the International Year of Chemistry. The Card has been available since May 12 in the Passenger Service Centres and on the website personalizacja.ztm.waw.pl.
The first woman professor at the Sorbonne in Paris – she took the chair of physics on May 13, 1906. She was born in Warsaw and spent 19 years there. Later on in her life she came back there many times and in 1925 she was awarded with the Honorary Citizen of Warsaw. She was the scholar of all times. She is the only woman untill today who received the Nobel Prize two times: in 1903 in Physics (together with her husband Pierre Curie and Henry Becquerel) for their joint researches on the radiation phenomena and in 1911 in Chemistry for the isolation of radium.
The places in Warsaw which refer to Maria Skłodowska-Curie include first of all Freta 16 (the house in which she was born on November 7, 1867 and was living for a year, now it is a museum), the square at Karowa Street (it was the seat of the 3rd Public Secondary School for Girls, from which she graduated with a gold medal in 1882, now the Bolesław Prus Monument stands there), Vistula embankment (her favourite walking destination) and the Museum of Industry and Agriculture (near the Castle Square, now the seat of the Central Agriculture Library). In the latter she carried out her first experiments and years later she confessed: ‘had they not taught me chemical analysis so well in Warsaw […] I would never have isolated radium’.
