There are two entries for this date: Marie S. Curie and Albert Camus.

On this date in 1867, two-time Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie, nee Sklodowska, was born in Warsaw, Poland. She abandoned her family's Roman Catholicism to become an agnostic as a teenager. Marie moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne in 1891, got her degree in math and married Pierre Curie in a civil ceremony. The couple had two daughters. Marie broke many barriers for her sex, becoming the first European woman to earn a science doctorate, as well as the first to be awarded a Nobel Prize, when she and Pierre were jointly awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics for discovering polonium (named for her home country) and radium. Marie coined the very word "radioactive," and pursued its therapeutic properties. In 1906, Pierre was tragically run over and killed. Marie took over his professorship of general physics, winning another first for women. When she won the 1911 Nobel Prize for chemistry, she was the first person male or female to have received two Nobels. Yet that same year she was barred as a woman from the Academy of Sciences. She became director of the Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris in 1914. She spent much of the remainder of her life pursuing her humanitarian goal of "easing human suffering." Their oldest daughter, Irene, with her husband Frederic Joliot-Curie, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1935 for work in artificial radioactivity. Marie died at 67 of leukemia. She became the first woman to be interred at the Pantheon on her own merits. Eve, in her memoir of her mother, Mme. Curie (1937), described all family members as rationalists. D. 1934.

On this date in 1913, Nobel Prize-winning writer Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria, to immigrant parents: a French father and a Spanish mother. After his father died during World War I in 1914, Albert's family was left in extreme poverty. Albert excelled in athletics and academics, and entered the University of Algiers studying philosophy, although a serious bout of tuberculosis cut short his studies. He joined the anti-Fascist communist party in 1934, but was soon after expelled from the Algerian Communist Party as a "Trotskyist." Camus wrote for a socialist paper in the late 1930s chronicling the plight of the poor. In 1940, Camus went to Paris, fled after the German invasion, returned to Algeria, was advised to leave, and at age 25, found himself back in Paris. Camus joined the Resistance, and after liberation was a columnist for the newspaper Combat. Major writings include the essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus," 1942, L'Etranger (The Stranger), 1942, La Peste (The Plague), 1947, which includes a priest character who insists a plague was sent as punishment from God, La Chute (The Fall), 1956, and L'Exile et le Royaume (Exile and the Kingdom), 1957, the year he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Camus was a pioneer of absurdist literature, a nonbeliever and a humanist. D. 1960.