Marie Skłodowska-Curie in the context of "Linus Pauling"

Sorbonne University (French: Sorbonne Université) is a public research university located in Paris, France. The institution's legacy reaches back to the Middle Ages in 1257 when the College of Sorbonne was established by Robert de Sorbon as a constituent college of the University of Paris, one of the first universities in Europe. Its current iteration was formed in 2018 by the merger of Paris-Sorbonne University (Paris IV) and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI).

Sorbonne University is one of the most sought after universities by students and researchers from France, Europe, and the French speaking countries. Most notably, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, who came from Poland in 1891 and joined the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Paris, was also the first woman to become a professor at the Sorbonne. Marie Curie and her husband Pierre Curie are considered the founders of the modern-day Faculty of Science and Engineering of Sorbonne University. As of 2021, its alumni and professors have won 33 Nobel Prizes, six Fields Medals, and one Turing Award.

Polonium is a chemical element; it has symbol Po and atomic number 84. A rare and highly radioactive metal (although sometimes classified as a metalloid) with no stable isotopes, polonium is a chalcogen and chemically similar to selenium and tellurium, though its metallic character resembles that of its horizontal neighbors in the periodic table: thallium, lead, and bismuth. Due to the short half-life of all its isotopes, its natural occurrence is limited to tiny traces of the fleeting polonium-210 (with a half-life of 138 days) in uranium ores, as it is the penultimate daughter of natural uranium-238. Though two longer-lived isotopes exist (polonium-209 with a half-life of 124 years and polonium-208 with a half-life of 2.898 years), they are much more difficult to produce. Today, polonium is usually produced in milligram quantities by the neutron irradiation of bismuth. Due to its intense radioactivity, which results in the radiolysis of chemical bonds and radioactive self-heating, its chemistry has mostly been investigated on the trace scale only.

Polonium was discovered on 18 July 1898 by Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie, when it was extracted from the uranium ore pitchblende and identified solely by its strong radioactivity: it was the first element to be discovered in this way. Polonium was named after Marie Skłodowska-Curie's homeland of Poland, which at the time was partitioned between three countries. Polonium has few applications, and those are related to its radioactivity: heaters in space probes, antistatic devices, sources of neutrons and alpha particles, and poison (e.g., poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko). It is extremely dangerous to humans.