John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh

About John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh

John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, remains a titan of physics, securing the #677 rank in MIT’s Historical Popularity Index due to foundational work across multiple fields. His contributions include rigorous studies in optics, acoustics, and the definitive explanation for the blue color of the sky—Rayleigh scattering. Furthermore, his highly precise determination of the density of atmospheric nitrogen led to the discovery of Argon, cementing his legacy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Despite this historical weight, Lord Rayleigh suffers from a significant modern attention gap. With only 47K annualized Wikipedia views in 2025, he is vastly underrepresented relative to his importance, showing an attention gap of -7x. To contextualize this deficit, his views are just one-seventh of those received by Ibn al-Haytham (#796 HPI), who is ranked only slightly lower in historical importance but garners 316K views, or less than a tenth of the attention given to Isaac Asimov (#920 HPI), who received 1.7M views despite being less historically impactful.

This lack of engagement is trending downward, as indicated by the -20.1% year-over-year change in Wikipedia traffic and a -26% drop in momentum between Q1 and Q3 of 2025, suggesting his foundational contributions to physics are increasingly overlooked in the digital sphere.