The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1952 was awarded jointly to Archer John Porter Martin and Richard Laurence Millington Synge "for their invention of partition chromatography".
 

Chromatography is the collective term for a set of laboratory techniques for the separation of mixtures which involves passing a mixture dissolved in a "mobile phase" through a stationary phase, which separates the analyte to be measured from other molecules in the mixture based on differential partitioning between the mobile and stationary phases. The method of Martin and Synge, in different forms, has already found extensive application in all branches of chemistry and important discoveries have been made with it. Their invention of partition chromatography has given to science a new tool which already has proved its usefulness in an impressive number of important investigations.