Portrait of Max Planck (1858-1947), German physicist, Nobel laureate and originator of quantum theory taken in 1895. Planck was educated at the universities of Berlin and Munich, gaining his doctorate in 1880. In 1900 Planck published a paper in which he described a formula for the distribution of radiation emitted by a black body as a function of temperature and wavelength. To do this, he deduced that the radiation is emitted in discrete packages (quanta), and calculated a constant to enable their energies to be found. This, with Einstein's work, led to the end of Classical Physics. Planck was awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize for Physics as a result.