Curie, Pierre (1859-1906)

French scientist. He shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 with his wife Marie Curie and Henri Becquerel for their research on radiation phenomena. 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.