who discovered cerium

Cerium was discovered in 1803 by the Swedish chemists Jöns Jacob Berzelius and Wilhelm von Hisinger, and independently in the same year by the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth. They found the new element in a mineral called cerite. Berzelius and Hisinger named the element cerium after the asteroid Ceres, which had been discovered just two years earlier. Although they could not isolate the pure metal at the time, they identified its properties and chemical reactions.