In 1891, Marie Curie enrolled in the Sorbonne, two days before her 24th birthday. She has been out of school for 5 years, is now in a foreign country (France instead of her homeland of Poland), has barely enough money to survive, and even faints from hunger on at least one occasion in the classroom. Yet she eventually graduated at the top of her class. Then on this same day in 5 Nov 1906, she delivered her first lecture at the Sorbonne as the first female physics teacher in the school's history.

At 1:30 pm, Marie Curie gave her inaugural lecture as the first woman lecturer at the Sorbonne. She explained the theory of ions in gases and her treatise on radioactivity to120 students, public and press. It wasn this same day, fifteen years earlier, 5 Nov 1891 that she first enrolled at the Sorbonne. Following the accidental death of her husband, Pierre Curie, she had been invited to occupy the Physics chair at the Sorbonne that he had held. Madame Curie, by now a Nobel prize winner and authority on radioactivity, continued the work she started with her husband.