Lord Rayleigh

John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh (b. November 12, 1842, Terling Place, Witham, England – d. June 30, 1919, Terling Place) was a physical scientist who made fundamental discoveries in the field of acoustics and optics that are basic to the theory of wave propagation in fluids. He received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1904 for his successful isolation of argon, a noble gas appearing in the Earth's atmosphere.

Rayleigh graduated from Trinity college, University of Cambridge, in 1865 as Senior Wrangler (highest score) in the Mathematical Tripos. His first paper (1869) explained the electromagnetic theory of James Clerk Maxwell in terms of analogies that a non-physicist would understand. In 1873 he succeeded to his father's title of Baron Rayleigh. On an excursion to Egypt taken because of his health, he wrote his famous two-volume treatise The Theory of Sound, published in 1877–78. He served as the second Cavendish professor of experimental physics (1879–84) at Cambridge, succeeding Maxwell. Subsequently he became secretary of the Royal Society of London. During the 1880s he conducted precision measurements of the density of gases, and in 1895 he isolated argon. He became chancellor of Cambridge University in 1908.