Who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize?

Marie Curie, in Physics in 1903 - and the committee initially planned to name only her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel. Pierre was told, objected, and insisted her name be added. She is also the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, taking Chemistry in 1911 for isolating radium and polonium.

The second prize came in the same year as a public scandal. Pierre had died in 1906 - run over by a horse-drawn cart in the street - and Marie was found to be in a relationship with a married former student. The French press ran it viciously, with a strong xenophobic and antisemitic element despite her not being Jewish, and a crowd gathered outside her house. A member of the Nobel committee wrote suggesting she not come to Stockholm to accept. She went.

In the First World War she designed mobile radiography units - petites Curies - drove one herself, trained around 150 women to operate them, and they X-rayed something over a million wounded men. She died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia from the radiation she had spent thirty years handling without protection. Her notebooks are still radioactive and are kept in lead-lined boxes; readers sign a waiver.