Ștefania Mărăcineanu: Why is a Google Doodle celebrating the Romanian physicist on her 140th birthday?

Google yesterday celebrates the 140th birthday of pioneering Romanian physicist Ștefania Mărăcineanu with a special commemorative Doodle.

The simple design pays homage to the scientist’s work on the chemical element polonium, discovered by Marie Curie.

It comes the day after the search engine honored another pioneering woman, British composer, teacher, and opera singer Amanda Aldridge, with another Doodle.

Who was Ștefania Mărăcineanu?

Ștefania Mărăcineanu was born in Bucharest on June 18, 1882, and enrolled in the university of her hometown in 1907.

She graduated three years later with a bachelor’s degree in physical and chemical sciences and became a teacher.

After working in Romania in 1915, Mărăcineanu took a position at the Central School for Girls in Bucharest, which she had attended as a child.

Parallel to his teaching work, Mărăcineanu continued his studies in radioactivity, taking a course at the Sorbonne with Marie Curie in 1919.

She then did further research with the famous physicist at the Radium Institute, where she earned his Ph.D. in 1924.

Mărăcineanu’s research focused on the half-life of polonium, which had been discovered by Curie in 1898.

She realized that the element’s half-life seemed to depend on the type of metal it was placed on, leading her to believe that radioactive isotopes could be formed from atoms after exposure to polonium’s alpha rays.

This discovery is considered the first example of artificial radioactivity, eventually earning Irene Joliot-Currie (Marie’s daughter) and her husband Frederic the Nobel Prize in 1935.

Despite the fact that Mărăcineanu’s doctoral thesis indicated that she had made the discovery more than a decade earlier, Joliot-Curie did not acknowledge his work.

It was officially recognized by the Romanian Academy of Sciences in 1936, but its role was ignored by the international scientific community at large.

What else did Ștefania Mărăcineanu do?

After working at the Meudon Astronomical Observatory outside Paris for four years, Mărăcineanu returned to Romania in 1929 and founded the country’s first radioactivity laboratory.

She conducted research on artificial rainfall and on the link between earthquakes and precipitation. Mărăcineanu was the first scientist to recognize that there is a significant increase in radioactivity at the epicenter before an earthquake.

The physicist became Research Director of the Romanian Academy of Sciences in 1937 and Associate Professor in 1941. She retired in 1942 and died in Bucharest on August 15, 1944, at the age of 62.