John Goodenough is 97 years old and still moving the state of the art forward...<p><a href="https://cen.acs.org/people/profiles/Podcast-97-lithium-ion-battery/97/i35" rel="nofollow">https://cen.acs.org/people/profiles/Podcast-97-lithium-ion-b...</a>
(article also mentions he studied with Zener after whom Zener diodes are named)<p>Middle-aged startup founders are kids!
The title is very uninformative, so:<p>This year it was won by John B Goodenough, M Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino for their work on the chemistry which enables the Lithium-Ion battery.
IMO Lithium-Ion batteries enabled a whole lot of computer devices: smartphones, watches, laptops. The world would not be the same without those batteries.
Interesting that they also awarded a person (Yoshino) doing a very practical aspect of the work (making it commercially viable), which is typically out of the scope of fundamental discoveries these awards target. As I understand it, anyway.