Question

who is the latest person discovered an element?

Answer 1

Well this is kind of not really how it works these days. See, now we understand elements to be collections of protons. 1 proton is hydrogen, 2 is helium, 3 is lithium, etc... But the problem comes down to at a certain number of protons, the atom becomes unstable. So hypothetically whether or not we observe an element, it can still theoretically exist. The problem is most elements will radioactively decay into other elements.

So now what happens is people are trying to make elements that are made up of as many protons as possible and see how long they can live without decaying and make a sizeable amount of them so they can observe and prove that they have them. But this isn't just one guy sitting at a lab bench, it's more like several large teams of physicists doing weird things with lasers and magnets firing atoms at each other at high speeds and what not.

So the last "person" to discover an element was a long time ago, but after Mendeleev basically discovered the periodic table and could predict new elements there really wasn't that same kind of "discovery" since we realized all atoms are just different numbers of the same material basically.

Answer 2

Me. abb0tium.