“Have no fear of perfection; you’ll never reach it.” – Marie Curie
A Britsh woman who recently celebrated her Birthday ordered a custom-made cake with a picture of her favorite singer, Mariah Carey.
However, the party girl was likely filled with emotion when she saw the final result, which had a picture not of her “Hero” superstar but the face of a science hero: namely, Marie Curie, who made groundbreaking discoveries on radioactivity.
On top of it all, the genius scientist looked “very festive,” said cousin and writer Harriet Alida Lye, who posted the photo of the cake on Twitter.
My cousin in England told her colleagues she wanted a Mariah Carey birthday cake. They misunderstood, and is the cake they made her instead. It’s Marie Curie, looking very festive. pic.twitter.com/LMHJnMATqD
— Harriet Alida Lye (@harrietalida) June 14, 2019
Lye’s cake tweet – which had “Happy Birthday Siobhan” written around Curie’s face, and was decorated with pink cupcakes – received more than 45,00 shares and 210,000 likes.
Mariah’s talents as a singer are undeniable: She is a recording artist loved worldwide and earned five Grammies since the release of her first album in 1990.
Marie’s accomplishments, however, are more than cake-worthy.
She discovered the first signs of radioactivity, an accomplishment that in 1903 earned her and her husband Pierre the Nobel Prize in Physics, which was awarded collectively with French physicist Henri Becquerel.
Marie Curie was the first female to be awarded the Nobel Prize, but her achievements did not end there. In 1911, she won a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering the elements polonium and radium. She is the only woman to have won two Nobel Prizes and the only person to receive the prize in two different scientific fields.
Curie passed in 1934 of aplastic anemia, a blood disease that is thought to have been caused by extensive exposure to radiation.
But if she were alive in this age, Curie might have been happy to find out about this case of mis-baken identity.
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