French
scientist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics 1903 with his wife
Marie
Curie and Henri Becquerel. From 1896 the Curies had worked together on
radioactivity, discovering two radioactive elements.
Pierre Curie was born in Paris and educated at the Sorbonne, becoming
an assistant there 1878. He discovered the piezoelectric effect and, after
being appointed head of the laboratory of the Ecole de Physique et Chimie,
went on to study magnetism and formulate Curie's law, which states that
magnetic susceptibility is inversely proportional to absolute temperature.
In 1895 he discovered the Curie point, the critical temperature at which
a paramagnetic substance become ferromagnetic. In 1904 he became professor
of physics at the Sorbonne. |