German physicist who discovered Wien's displacement law, which states that the wavelength of maximum intensity of emission for a blackbody is given by a constant over the temperature of the blackbody. He also tried to construct an equation to describe the blackbody function, but his equation only worked at short wavelengths. Rayleigh had derived an equation which worked at long wavelengths, but it was Planck who derived a function which reproduced the observed distribution over all wavelengths.

Additional biographies: MacTutor (St. Andrews), Bonn