Mind Philosopher: March 2020

Marie Curie : Biography

Marie Curie : Biography

Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, in Physics, and with her later win, in Chemistry, she became the first person to claim Nobel honors twice. Her efforts with her husband Pierre led to the discovery of polonium and radium, and she championed the development of X-rays.

Who Was Marie Curie?

Marie Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person — man or woman — to win the award twice. With her husband Pierre Curie, Marie's efforts led to the discovery of polonium and radium and, after Pierre's death, the further development of X-rays. The famed scientist died in 1934 of aplastic anemia likely caused by exposure to radiation.

Childhood and Education

Maria Sklodowska, later known as Marie Curie, was born on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw (modern-day Poland). Curie was the youngest of five children, following siblings Zosia, Józef, Bronya and Hela.

Both of Curie’s parents were teachers. Her father, Wladyslaw, was a math and physics instructor. When she was only 10, Curie lost her mother, Bronislawa, to tuberculosis.

As a child, Curie took after her father. She had a bright and curious mind and excelled at school. But despite being a top student in her secondary school, Curie could not attend the male-only University of Warsaw. She instead continued her education in Warsaw's "floating university," a set of underground, informal classes held in secret.

Both Curie and her sister Bronya dreamed of going abroad to earn an official degree, but they lacked the financial resources to pay for more schooling. Undeterred, Curie worked out a deal with her sister: She would work to support Bronya while she was in school, and Bronya would return the favor after she completed her studies.

For roughly five years, Curie worked as a tutor and a governess. She used her spare time to study, reading about physics, chemistry and math.

In 1891, Curie finally made her way to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne. She threw herself into her studies, but this dedication had a personal cost: with little money, Curie survived on buttered bread and tea, and her health sometimes suffered because of her poor diet.

Curie completed her master's degree in physics in 1893 and earned another degree in mathematics the following year.

Marriage to Pierre Curie

Marie married French physicist Pierre Curie on July 26, 1895. They were introduced by a colleague of Marie’s after she graduated from Sorbonne University; Marie had received a commission to perform a study on different types of steel and their magnetic properties and needed a lab for her work.

A romance developed between the brilliant pair, and they became a scientific dynamic duo who were completely devoted to one another. At first, Marie and Pierre worked on separate projects. But after Marie discovered radioactivity, Pierre put aside his own work to help her with her research.

Marie suffered a tremendous loss in 1906 when Pierre was killed in Paris after accidentally stepping in front of a horse-drawn wagon. Despite her tremendous grief, she took over his teaching post at the Sorbonne, becoming the institution's first female professor.

In 1911, Curie’s relationship with her husband's former student, Paul Langevin, became public. Curie was derided in the press for breaking up Langevin's marriage, the negativity in part stemming from rising xenophobia in France.

Children

In 1897, Marie and Pierre welcomed a daughter, Irène. The couple had a second daughter, Ève, in 1904.

Irène Joliot-Curie followed in her mother's footsteps, winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935. Joliot-Curie shared the honor with her husband, Frédéric Joliot, for their work on the synthesis of new radioactive elements.

In 1937, Ève Curie wrote the first of many biographies devoted to her famous mother, Madame Curie, which became a feature film a few years later.

What Did Marie Curie Discover?

Curie discovered radioactivity, and, together with her husband Pierre, the radioactive elements polonium and radium while working with the mineral pitchblende. She also championed the development of X-rays after Pierre's death.

Radioactivity, Polonium and Radium

Fascinated with the work of Henri Becquerel, a French physicist who discovered that uranium casts off rays weaker than the X-rays found by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, Curie took his work a few steps further.

Curie conducted her own experiments on uranium rays and discovered that they remained constant, no matter the condition or form of the uranium. The rays, she theorized, came from the element's atomic structure. This revolutionary idea created the field of atomic physics. Curie herself coined the word "radioactivity" to describe the phenomena.

Following Curie’s discovery of radioactivity, she continued her research with her husband Pierre. Working with the mineral pitchblende, the pair discovered a new radioactive element in 1898. They named the element polonium, after Curie's native country of Poland.

They also detected the presence of another radioactive material in the pitchblende and called that radium. In 1902, the Curies announced that they had produced a decigram of pure radium, demonstrating its existence as a unique chemical element.

Development of X-rays

When World War I broke out in 1914, Curie devoted her time and resources to help the cause. She championed the use of portable X-ray machines in the field, and these medical vehicles earned the nickname "Little Curies."

After the war, Curie used her celebrity to advance her research. 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.

Marie Curie's Nobel Prizes

Curie won two Nobel Prizes, for physics in 1903 and for chemistry in 1911. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize as well as the first person—man or woman—to win the prestigious award twice. She remains the only person to be honored for accomplishments in two separate sciences.

Curie received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, along with her husband and Henri Becquerel, for their work on radioactivity. With their win, the Curies developed an international reputation for their scientific efforts, and they used their prize money to continue their research.

In 1911, Curie won her second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for her discovery of radium and polonium. While she received the prize alone, she shared the honor jointly with her late husband in her acceptance lecture.

Around this time, Curie joined with other famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Max Planck, to attend the first Solvay Congress in Physics and discuss the many groundbreaking discoveries in their field.

Death

Curie died on July 4, 1934, of aplastic anemia, believed to be caused by prolonged exposure to radiation.

She was known to carry test tubes of radium around in the pocket of her lab coat. Her many years working with radioactive materials took a toll on her health.

Marie Curie's Legacy

Curie made many breakthroughs in her lifetime. Remembered as a leading figure in science and a role model for women, she has received numerous posthumous honors. Several educational and research institutions and medical centers bear the Curie name, including the Curie Institute and Pierre and Marie Curie University (UPMC).

In 1995, Marie and Pierre's remains were interred in the Panthéon in Paris, the final resting place of France's greatest minds. Marie became the first and one of only five women to be laid to rest there. In 2017, the Panthéon hosted an exhibition to honor the 150th birthday of the pioneering scientist.

The story of the Nobel laureate was back on the big screen in 2017 with Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge, featuring Polish actress Karolina Gruszka. In 2018, Amazon announced the development of another biopic of Curie, with British actress Rosamund Pike in the starring role.

Source : https://www.biography.com/scientist/marie-curie

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Anne Frank : The Diary of Anne Frank

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Anne Frank Biography (1929–1945)

Who Was Anne Frank?

Anne Frank was a Jewish teenager who went into hiding during the Holocaust, journaling her experiences in the renowned work 'The Diary of Anne Frank.'

Annelies Marie “Anne” Frank was a world-famous German-born diarist and World War II Holocaust victim. Her work, The Diary of Anne Frank, has been read by millions.

Fleeing Nazi persecution of Jews, the family moved to Amsterdam and later went into hiding for two years. During this time, Frank wrote about her experiences and wishes. In 1945, the family was found and sent to concentration camps, where Frank died at the age of 15.

Anne Frank's Family

Frank's mother was Edith Frank. Her father, Otto Frank, was a lieutenant in the German army during World War I, later becoming a businessman in Germany and the Netherlands. Anne had a sister named Margot, who was three years her senior. Otto was the only member of his immediate family to survive the concentration camps.

Early Life and Education

Frank was born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany. The Franks were a typical upper-middle-class, German-Jewish family living in a quiet, religiously diverse neighborhood near the outskirts of Frankfurt. But she was born on the eve of dramatic changes in German society that would soon disrupt her family's happy, tranquil life as well as the lives of all other German Jews.

Due in large part to the harsh sanctions imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, the German economy struggled terribly in the 1920s. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the virulently anti-Semitic National German Socialist Workers Party (Nazi Party) led by Adolf Hitler became Germany's leading political force, winning control of the government in 1933.

"I can remember that as early as 1932, groups of Storm Troopers came marching by, singing, 'When Jewish blood splatters from the knife,'" Otto later recalled.

When Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 20, 1933, the Frank family immediately realized that it was time to flee. They moved to Amsterdam, Netherlands, in the fall of 1933.

Otto later said, "Though this did hurt me deeply, I realized that Germany was not the world, and I left my country forever."

Frank described the circumstances of her family's emigration years later in her diary: "Because we're Jewish, my father immigrated to Holland in 1933, where he became the managing director of the Dutch Opekta Company, which manufactures products used in making jam."

After years of enduring anti-Semitism in Germany, the Franks were relieved to once again enjoy freedom in their new hometown of Amsterdam. "In those days, it was possible for us to start over and to feel free," Otto recalled.

Frank began attending Amsterdam's Sixth Montessori School in 1934, and throughout the rest of the 1930s, she lived a relatively happy and normal childhood. Frank had many friends, Dutch and German, Jewish and Christian, and she was a bright and inquisitive student.

On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, igniting a global conflict that would become World War II. On May 10, 1940, the German army invaded the Netherlands. The Dutch surrendered on May 15, 1940, marking the beginning of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

As Frank later wrote in her diary, "After May 1940, the good times were few and far between; first there was the war, then the capitulation and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews."

Beginning in October 1940, the Nazi occupiers imposed anti-Jewish measures in the Netherlands. Jews were required to wear a yellow Star of David at all times and observe a strict curfew; they were also forbidden from owning businesses. Frank and her sister were forced to transfer to a segregated Jewish school.

Otto managed to keep control of his company by officially signing ownership over to two of his Christian associates, Jo Kleiman and Victor Kugler, while continuing to run the company from behind the scenes.

Hiding in the Secret Annex

On July 5, 1942, Margot received an official summons to report to a Nazi work camp in Germany. The very next day, the Frank family went into hiding in makeshift quarters in an empty space at the back of Otto's company building, which they referred to as the Secret Annex.

The Franks were accompanied in hiding by Otto's business partner Hermann van Pels as well as his wife, Auguste, and son, Peter. Otto's employees Kleiman and Kugler, as well as Jan and Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, provided food and information about the outside world.

The families spent two years in hiding, never once stepping outside the dark, damp, sequestered portion of the building.

Concentration Camp

On August 4, 1944, a German secret police officer accompanied by four Dutch Nazis stormed into the Secret Annex, arresting everyone that was hiding there including Frank and her family. They had been betrayed by an anonymous tip, and the identity of their betrayer remains unknown to this day.

The residents of the Secret Annex were shipped off to Camp Westerbork, a concentration camp in the northeastern Netherlands. They arrived by a passenger train on August 8, 1944. In the middle of the night on September 3, 1944, they were transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Upon arriving at Auschwitz, the men and women were separated. This was the last time that Otto ever saw his wife or daughters.

After several months of hard labor hauling heavy stones and grass mats, Frank and Margot were again transferred. They arrived at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany during the winter, where food was scarce, sanitation was awful and disease ran rampant.

Their mother was not allowed to go with them. Edith fell ill and died at Auschwitz shortly after arriving at the camp, on January 6, 1945.

Anne Frank's Death

Frank and her sister Margot both came down with typhus in the early spring of 1945. They died within a day of each other in March 1945, only a few weeks before British soldiers liberated the German Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where they were interned. Frank was just 15 years old at the time of her death, one of more than 1 million Jewish children who died in the Holocaust.

At the end of the war, Frank's father Otto, the sole survivor of the concentration camps, returned home to Amsterdam, searching desperately for news of his family. On July 18, 1945, he met two sisters who had been with Frank and Margot at Bergen-Belsen and delivered the tragic news of their deaths.

The Diary of Anne Frank

The Secret Annex: Diary Letters from June 14, 1942 to August 1, 1944 was a selection of passages from Frank's diary that was published on June 25, 1947, by her father Otto. The Diary of a Young Girl, as it's typically called in English, has since been published in 67 languages. Countless editions, as well as screen and stage adaptations, of the work have been created worldwide, and it remains one of the most moving and widely read firsthand accounts of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust.

On June 12, 1942, Frank's parents gave her a red-checkered diary for her 13th birthday. She wrote her first entry, addressed to an imaginary friend named Kitty, that same day: "I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support."

During the two years Frank spent hiding from the Nazis with her family in the Secret Annex in Amsterdam, she wrote extensive daily entries in her diary to pass the time. Some betrayed the depth of despair into which she occasionally sunk during day after day of confinement.

"I've reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die," she wrote on February 3, 1944. "The world will keep on turning without me, and I can't do anything to change events anyway." The act of writing allowed Frank to maintain her sanity and her spirits. "When I write, I can shake off all my cares," she wrote on April 5, 1944.

When Otto returned to Amsterdam from the concentration camps at the end of the war, he found Frank's diary, which had been saved by Miep Gies. He eventually gathered the strength to read it. He was awestruck by what he discovered.

"There was revealed a completely different Anne to the child that I had lost," Otto wrote in a letter to his mother. "I had no idea of the depths of her thoughts and feelings."

For all its passages of despair, Frank's diary is essentially a story of faith, hope and love in the face of hate. "If she had been here, Anne would have been so proud," Otto said.

Frank's diary endures, not only because of the remarkable events she described but due to her extraordinary gifts as a storyteller and her indefatigable spirit through even the most horrific of circumstances.

"It's utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death," she wrote on July 15, 1944. "I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more."

In addition to her diary, Frank filled a notebook with quotes from her favorite authors, original stories and the beginnings of a novel about her time in the Secret Annex. Her writings reveal a teenage girl with creativity, wisdom, depth of emotion and rhetorical power far beyond her years.

Anne Frank's Hidden Diary Pages & Dirty Jokes

In May 2018, researchers uncovered two hidden pages in Frank's diary that contained dirty jokes and "sexual matters," which the teen covered with pasted brown paper. “I sometimes imagine that someone might come to me and ask me to inform him about sexual matters,” Frank wrote in Dutch. “How would I go about it?”

Frank tried to answer these questions as if she's speaking to an imaginary person, using phrases like “rhythmical movements” to describe sex and “internal medicament,” alluding to contraception.

Frank also wrote about her menstrual cycle, saying it's "a sign that she is ripe," devoted space to "dirty jokes" and reference prostitution: "In Paris they have big houses for that.”

The pages were dated September 28, 1942, and were part of her first diary - the one she intended only for herself. “It is really interesting and adds meaning to our understanding of the diary," said Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House. “It’s a very cautious start to her becoming a writer.”

After the end of World War II, the Secret Annex was on a list of buildings to be demolished, but a group of people in Amsterdam campaigned and set up the foundation now known as the Anne Frank House. The house preserved Frank’s hiding spot; today it is one of the three most popular museums in Amsterdam.

In June 2013, the Anne Frank House lost a lawsuit to the Anne Frank Fonds, after the Fonds sued the House for the return of documents linked to Anne and Otto Frank. Frank’s physical diary and other writings, however, are property of the Dutch state and have been on permanent loan to the House since 2009.

In 2015, the Fonds, the copyright holders of Frank’s diary, lost a lawsuit against the Anne Frank House after the House began new scientific research on the texts in 2011.

In 2009, the Anne Frank Center USA launched a national initiative called the Sapling Project, planting saplings from a 170-year-old chestnut tree that Frank had long loved (as denoted in her diary) at 11 different sites nationwide.