Marie Curie. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. She was both a physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity, a term she coined. She discovered both polonium and radium in 1898. She was the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris and she was also the first woman to become a member of the Institut de France.