Marie Curie
A physicist and chemist from Warsaw who discovered two elements and won the Nobel Prize twice.
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A university that did not exist
Maria Skłodowska was born in Warsaw in 1867, in the part of Poland ruled by the Russian Empire.
Universities there did not admit women, so she and her sister Bronisława studied at the clandestine Flying University.
BaseKG records the two as sisters, but the sample does not draw that line.
Paris
In late 1891 she followed Bronisława to Paris and enrolled at the University of Paris.
She took a degree in physics in 1893 and one in mathematics the next year.
Her links to the University of Paris and the Sorbonne were read from Wikipedia text by a model, and checked by hand.
Pierre
On July 26, 1895, she married the physicist Pierre Curie.
They shared long bicycle trips, and soon a laboratory.
BaseKG’s Wikidata facts do not record the marriage. This line was read from Wikipedia text, and checked by hand.
Two new elements
Working on pitchblende, a uranium ore, the Curies found polonium in July 1898 and radium in December.
She named polonium after Poland, and they coined the word radioactivity.
BaseKG records both elements as created by her: its broad, first-level relation, as it has none finer for a discovery.
Stockholm
In 1903 the Curies shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Henri Becquerel.
She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.
BaseKG records her as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, whose name heads the diploma.
Alone
Pierre was killed by a horse-drawn cart in a Paris street on April 19, 1906. She took over his post, the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris.
In 1911, the year of this photograph of the first Solvay conference, she won a second Nobel Prize, in chemistry.
Harriet Brooks and William Duane both worked in her laboratory in these years. BaseKG records each as influenced by her; the sample draws neither line.
Little Curies
When war came in 1914 she fitted cars with X-ray equipment and took them to field hospitals.
They became known as petites Curies, little Curies.
Her Radium Institute in Paris, whose building was finished in 1914, is in the sample as the Curie Institute.
Irène
Her elder daughter Irène, who had worked the X-ray cars beside her as a teenager, joined her at the Radium Institute.
In 1935, the year after her mother died, Irène shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with her husband, Frédéric Joliot.
The line from Marie to Irène was read from Wikipedia text by a model, and checked by hand.
The Panthéon
From 1922 she sat on the League of Nations committee for intellectual cooperation. She died on July 4, 1934, of anemia most likely caused by radiation.
In 1995 she and Pierre were reburied in the Panthéon; she was the first woman honored there for her own achievements.
What carries her name
A unit of radioactivity, the curie, honors her and Pierre. A mineral and an asteroid are named after her.
So are universities and cancer institutes, among them the Radium Institute in Warsaw, opened in 1932 with Bronisława as its first director.
Several of the lines the sample draws to her are things named after her or created by her.
What the graph holds
Everything above rests on this small neighborhood of BaseKG: Marie Curie, and what sits one hop from her.
The sample this story sits in holds 899 of BaseKG's 1,063,614 entities, and 1,507 of its 6,905,330 facts.
The grid is the whole graph, one dot for every 899 entities. The lit dot is the size of this sample.
Lines are the facts in the sample. A date in a solid outline is BaseKG's; a dashed one is ours, from the sources below, because the graph does not carry it.
Events and dates: Wikidata; Wikipedia articles on Marie Curie, Pierre Curie, Bronisława Dłuska, polonium, radium, William Duane and the Solvay Conference; the 1903 Nobel diploma
Images via Wikimedia Commons, public domain unless marked: