Theodore William Richards

Theodore William Richards was born January 31, 1868, into a world where the periodic table was still new and its numbers uncertain. He became a physical chemist who made atomic weight determination his life's work — not flashy, but foundational. The Nobel committee recognized him "in recognition of his exact determinations of the atomic weights of a large number of the chemical elements," a citation that understates the obsessive rigor required. He died April 2, 1928, having given chemistry the numbers it could trust.