In 1903, Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in physics. She was awarded the prize with her husband, Pierre, and with Antoine Becquerel for their discovery of over forty radioactive elements and other breakthroughs in the field of radioactivity.

In 1963, Maria Goeppert-Mayer became the second woman and the first and only American woman to win the Nobel Prize in physics for her discovery of the shell model of the nucleus.