Marie Curie isn't an urban legend like Helen Keller, but certainly it's notable that her husband, Pierre Curie, made himself into a world expert in magnetism in the 1870s, discovered piezoelectricity and experimented with its applications in the 1880s, used his piezoelectric instruments to measure radioactivity and identify radium and polonium in the 1890s (when Marie Curie first became his lab assistant), and then in the early '00s worked to further isolate samples of radioactive elements (with his wife) and characterize the energy and charge of radioactive decay byproducts (with his grad students). After her husband's death in 1906, Marie Curie did continue their research program and finally isolated radium in 1910. Unlike her husband's illustrious career in the 20 years before he met his wife (remember, in piezoelectricity he discovered a whole new branch of physical phenomena), Marie never had a major discovery after 1910; she survived her husband by 21 years, but devoted her energy to the Red Cross, the League of Nations, and fundraising for various schools. She also wrote a biography of her late husband. The 1903 Nobel Prize was originally voted to go to Pierre Curie and Becquerel, but Curie insisted his wife be named co-awardee; the 1911 Nobel Prize was awarded to Marie Curie for her and her husband's discovery of radium and polonium, both published in 1898. I'm not denying she was a brilliant woman, and Pierre Curie was lucky to have her, but the fetishization of her by the "woman in science" agenda in elementary schools is mildly ridiculous, since Pierre Curie's lifetime accomplishments and research agenda would have been substantially unchanged if they had never met (or if Marie had returned to Poland in 1894, as she had originally planned).