Pierre Curie

Pierre Curie was a French physicist who, together with his wife Marie Curie, discovered the radioactive elements polonium and radium in 1898 while investigating the penetrating rays that Henri Becquerel had recently found being emitted by uranium salts. Pierre Curie's own earlier work on piezoelectricity, the electric charge that certain crystals generate under mechanical stress, and on the temperature-dependent loss of magnetism in heated materials, a property later named the Curie point in his honor, had already established him as a significant physicist before he turned to radioactivity. He shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Marie Curie and Henri Becquerel for their joint work on radioactivity, three years before his death in a Paris street accident in 1906 cut short his research.