The physicist – chemist who was honored with two Nobel Prizes – Marie Curie has been voted as the most notable female scientist of all time in the New Scientist and L'Oreal poll.

In the New Scientist poll of 800 scientists conducted for cosmetics company L'Oreal, Marie Curie, the Polish-born French scientist, who was a pioneer in the field of radioactivity and the first female professor at the University of Paris, got 25% of the votes to win the top position in the poll.

The Second position in the poll went to Rosalind Franklin, the English biophysicist who discovered DNA structure; Franklin got 14.2 votes, followed by Mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria (3rd with 9.4% votes), Astrophysicist Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell (4th with 4.7% votes), Mathematician Ada, Countess of Lovelace (5th with 4.5% votes), Austrian physicist Lise Meitner (6th with 4.4% votes), British X-ray technique pioneer chemist Dorothy Hodgkin (7th with 3.8% votes), Mathematician Sophie Germain (8th with 3.7% votes), American marine biologist Rachel Carson (9th with 3.3% votes), and Primatologist Dr Jane Goodall (10th with 2.7% votes).

Only two – astrophysicist Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell and the primatologist Dr Jane Goodall – of the top-ten are alive.   

Marie Sklodowska Curie was born in on 7 November 1867, in Warsaw (then Vistula Country, Russian Empire; now Poland). She created a theory of radioactivity, techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and discovered two new elements - polonium and radium. She pioneered radioactive cancer treatment in the early 20th century. She died on 4 July 1934 (aged 66) in Passy, France.