Wilhelm Wien belongs to a select group of physicists who had an equal mastery of both the experimental and the theoretical.

His most important contributions were in the field of thermal radiation. His formulation of Wien’s law about such radiation and the concept, developed with Otto Lummer in 1896, for the realization of an actual black body to study thermal radiation were both revolutionary. This work gained him the Nobel Prize in 1911.

Wien provided the essential prerequisite for Planck’s formulation of a law of radiation as well as for Einstein’s work about the light quanta hypothesis in 1905.