Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ernest Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements and the chemistry of radioactive substances. The prize was granted by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
The gold foil experiment, performed under Rutherford's direction in 1909 by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, fired alpha particles at a thin sheet of gold foil. Some particles deflected at very high angles, which no existing theory predicted. Rutherford interpreted this as evidence that atoms have a very small, densely charged nucleus containing most of the atom's mass.
Ernest Rutherford was a New Zealand physicist and chemist, born on the 30th of August 1871 in Brightwater, New Zealand. He is known as the father of nuclear physics and made foundational discoveries including the concept of radioactive half-life, the naming of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation, the nuclear model of the atom, and the proton.
Rutherford theorized the existence of the neutron in his 1920 Bakerian Lecture and named it. The experimental proof came in 1932, when his associate James Chadwick confirmed the neutron by bombarding beryllium with alpha particles. Chadwick received the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery in 1935.
Radioactive half-life refers to the fixed amount of time it takes for exactly half of a radioactive sample to decay. Rutherford coined the term after observing with R. B. Owens that thoron always took 11 minutes for half its sample to decay, regardless of the sample's size. He and Frederick Soddy published the Law of Radioactive Change to account for this phenomenon.
Ernest Rutherford was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and buried in Westminster Abbey near Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and other British scientists. He died on the 19th of October 1937 in Cambridge at the age of 66.