John William Strutt, who held the title Lord Rayleigh, received almost every honor available to a British scientist, including the Nobel Prize in physics in 1904. Lord Rayleigh never claimed that his methods were original, but he was very versatile in applying them. He specialized in technical physics, now called engineering physics. In his research, Rayleigh alternated between theory and experiment.

During his 50-year scientific career, Rayleigh published nearly 500 technical papers. He was professor at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University and later served as chancellor at Cambridge. Rayleigh was fellow, secretary and president of the Royal Society of London and received numerous honorary degrees from universities and science academies around the world. Early in his career, Lord Rayleigh started and helped to fund the Rayleigh farms and dairies that paid the family expenses during his academic career.

Rayleigh pursued classical physics in fields such as mechanics, dynamics, acoustics...