Thomas Young

Thomas Young was an English physician and physicist who established the principle of interference of light and thus resurrected the century-old wave theory of light. He was also an Egyptologist who helped decipher the Rosetta Stone. His primary interest was in sense perception, and, while still a medical student, he had discovered the way in which the lens of the eye changes shape to focus on objects at different distances. He was the first to describe astigmatism, in 1801, the same year he turned to the study of light.