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Frederick Soddy
1877–1956 · United Kingdom · Born in the 1800s
Nobel Chemistry 1921
Showed with Rutherford that radioactive decay transmutes elements and introduced the concept of isotopes.
Nobel Prize work
The 1921 Nobel Prize in Chemistry honored his studies of radioactive substances, above all the concept of isotopes. Analyzing the uranium and thorium decay chains, he formulated the displacement law — alpha decay shifts an element two places back, beta decay one place forward — and showed that chemically identical atoms can differ in atomic mass, coining the word 'isotope'.