Louis deBroglie
1892-1987

De Broglie had a mind of a theoretician rather than one of an experimenter or engineer. De Broglie's 1924 doctoral thesis Recherches sur la théorie des quanta (tr. "Researches on the quantum theory") introduced his theory of electron waves. This included the particle-wave property duality theory of matter, based on the work of Einstein and Planck.

He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1929 for his discovery of the wave nature of electrons, known as the de Broglie hypothesis or mécanique ondulatoire. The suggested association that any moving particle or object had an associated wave implied the possibility to build an electronic microscopes to get much better image resolution than optical ones because of shorter wavelength.