who became a professor at Cambridge University in 1884. He is best known for his work on cathode rays, which led to his discovery of the electron in 1897. He went on to study the conduction of electricity through gases, and it is for this work that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1906. His son, Sir George Paget Thomson (1892–1975), discovered electron diffraction, for which he shared the 1937 Nobel Prize for physics with Clinton J. Davisson (1881–1958), who independently made the same discovery.