Pierre Curie

Pierre Curie (Paris, May 15, 1859-ibid. April 19, 1906) was a French physicist, pioneer in the study of radioactivity and discoverer of piezoelectricity, who was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 together with Marie Curie and Antoine Henri Becquerel.

Early Years

His father was a family doctor established in Paris. During his early school years he was educated in the family home as his father believed that this path was more suitable for developing his intellectual and personal abilities.

At the age of sixteen he already showed a deep interest in mathematics and had a special facility in learning spatial geometry, which was useful in his studies on crystallography.

In 1878, at the age of eighteen and after enrolling at the Sorbonne Faculty of Sciences at the age of sixteen, he obtained his license ès sciences, the equivalent of a master's degree today, without being able to start his doctoral studies due to lack of economic resources and going to work in an insufficiently paid position as a laboratory assistant at the Sorbonne.

First discoveries

In 1880 he discovered piezoelectricity with his brother Jacques, that is, the phenomenon by which an electrical potential is generated by compressing a quartz crystal. Subsequently, both brothers demonstrated the opposite effect: that crystals can be deformed when subjected to a potential.

He enunciated in 1894 the universal principle of symmetry: the symmetries present in the causes of a physical phenomenon are also found in its consequences.

During his doctorate and the following years he devoted himself to research around magnetism. He developed a very sensitive torsion balance to study magnetic phenomena and studied ferromagnetism, paramagnetism, and diamagnetism. As a result of these studies, he highlights the discovery of the effect of temperature on paramagnetism, currently known as Curie's law. He also discovered that ferromagnetic substances present a temperature above which they lose their ferromagnetic character; this temperature is known as the temperature or Curie point.

Personal life and death

Wedding of Pierre and Marie Curie (1895).

Pierre and Marie Curie were the parents of Irène Joliot-Curie (who, continuing the work started by her parents, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 together with her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie) and Ève Curie.

Recorded from the time that illustrates his fatal accident.

Pierre died in an accident on the morning of April 19, 1906, when he was struck by a horse-drawn carriage on the rue Dauphine, near Saint Germain de Pres, in Paris. On April 21, 1995, the remains of Pierre Curie were transferred from the family vault to the Panthéon in Paris.

Awards and recognitions

Diploma received by Pierre and Marie Curie in 1903, being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

In 1903, Pierre Curie received the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Marie Curie and Henri Becquerel, in recognition of the extraordinary services rendered jointly in their investigations into the radiation discovered by the latter.

Both were also awarded the Davy Medal of the Royal Society of London in 1903. In 1910 the Congress of Radiology approved naming the unit of radioactive activity curium (3.7×10^{10< /sup> disintegrations per second).}

In his honor, as well as that of his wife, the asteroid (7000) Curie, discovered on November 6, 1939 by Fernand Rigaux, is named. The synthetic element curium (Cm) discovered in 1944 was also named in his honor, as well as the Curie crater on the Moon and the Curie crater on Mars.