Wilhelm Wien was a German physicist who was awarded the 1911 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discoveries concerning the laws of heat radiation. He studied mathematics and natural sciences in university and worked in Hermann von Helmholtz's laboratory. In 1893, Wien announced the law of displacement, which states that wavelength changes with temperature and later became an important law of heat radiation. His work on this and other topics contributed to the transition from Newtonian to quantum physics. He was seen as leading physics to the gates of quantum theory.