Born in New Zealand to a Scottish father and English mother, Ernest Rutherford went to Cambridge University in 1894 following an undergraduate degree in mathematics and physics from Canterbury College. He then spent 10 years at McGill University in Montreal before returning to England, eventually as Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge. He was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry ‘for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances’, and he named many of the basic components of atomic physics such as alpha, beta and gamma rays, the proton, the neutron, and half-life. He was the first to realize that almost all of the mass of an atom, and all its positively charged components, were concentrated in a tiny proportion of the atom’s size which came to be known as the ‘nucleus’.