22 www.photoniques.com I Photoniques 101 BIOGRAPHY GUSTAV MIE Gustav Mie: the man, the theory W ere you asked to name famous 20 th century physicists, it is rather unlikely that Gustav Mie would be near the top of your list. Nevertheless, starting from the late 1940's, Mie's 1908 opus [1] on the scattering of light scattering by a spherical particle has played an important role in physics and technology. So who was Gustav Mie and how did a single publication au-thored by him in the early 20 th century, treating a 19th century problem, become an entire methodology , most often referred to simply as 'Mie theory', with literally tens of thousands of citations in the 20 th and 21 st centuries? Gustav Mie was a German scientist who published a rigorous electromagnetic scattering theory by a spherically shaped particle in 1908, but which only began to attract attention some fifty years later. How then did Gustav Mie, who was initially attracted to science by his interest in mathematics and mineralogy, publish a 'hidden gem' that now shines so brightly over physics?