Marie Curie and her daughter, Irene; anon., 1925. Marie Curie (1867-1934) was a Polish-French physicist and chemist. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the only woman to date to win in two fields, and the only person to win in multiple sciences. Her achievements included a theory of radioactivity (a term that she coined), techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of two elements, polonium and radium. Irène Joliot-Curie (1897-1956) was a French scientist, the elder daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie and the wife of Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Jointly with her husband, Joliot-Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1935 for their discovery of artificial radioactivity.