One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.

She concluded that if her earlier results relating the quantity of uranium to its activity were correct then these two minerals must contain small quantities of some other substance that was far more active than uranium. In Poland Marie Curie had received honorary doctorates from the Lwów Polytechnic (1912) Poznań University (1922) Kraków's Jagiellonian University (1924) and the Warsaw Polytechnic (1926). He soon earned a doctorate and pursued an academic career as a mathematician becoming a professor and rector of Kraków University.

She named the first chemical element that Marie Curie discovered – polonium which Marie Curie first isolated in 1898 – after her native country. She taught her daughters the Polish language and took them on visits to Poland.