Max von Laue

Max von Laue (1879 to 1960) was a German physicist who in 1912 predicted, and with collaborators experimentally confirmed, that a crystal's regular lattice diffracts X-rays the way a grating diffracts light, proving both that X-rays are electromagnetic waves and that crystals are periodic arrangements of atoms. The discovery opened the atomic structure of crystalline matter to direct study and won him the 1914 Nobel Prize in Physics.