Planck's 1918 Nobel Prize was awarded
in recognition of the services he rendered to the advancement of Physics by his discovery of energy quanta
in 1900.
However, why do I sometimes see Einstein attributed for this discovery?
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$\begingroup$ Because it is complicated, and Nobel committee's formulations are not a very good guide to history. Planck in his words made "a purely formal assumption" and "did not give it much thought", and that assumption was not about quantizing energy, only energy exchanges. Einstein was first to take energy quanta of EM field to be something physical in 1905, and for a decade he was the only one hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/3404/… $\endgroup$– ConifoldMay 25, 2016 at 21:56
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