Richards, Theodore William, 1868–1928, American chemist, b. Germantown, Pa., Ph.D. Harvard, 1888. Richards was a professor at Harvard from 1891 until his death in 1928. In 1914 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for accurately determining the atomic weights of more than 25 chemical elements and ascertaining the existence of isotopes, chemical elements that have the same atomic number and position in the periodic table but different atomic masses and physical properties. He is credited with making significant improvements to the methods used for determining atomic weights.
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