John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh

John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh (1842 to 1919) was an English scientist who worked on the theory of waves and made wide use of applied mathematics. Born in Essex, he took the mathematical Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, coached by Edward Routh, and was Senior Wrangler and first Smith's prizeman in 1865. His theory of scattering explained why the sky is blue, and his two volume Theory of Sound appeared in 1877 and 1878. He was second Cavendish professor of experimental physics at Cambridge from 1879 to 1884, discovered the gas argon, which earned him the Nobel Prize in 1904, and introduced the theory of surface elastic waves now called Rayleigh waves in a paper of 1885. He served as President of the London Mathematical Society and of the Royal Society, and his list of publications runs to 446 items.