James Clerk Maxwell
lorenetworking
The theorist whose 1865 equations described electricity, magnetism and light as one field, and predicted that electromagnetic waves travel at the speed of light.
The order matters: the prediction came two decades before anyone demonstrated it. Radio existed on paper long before it existed in a laboratory, which is worth remembering whenever a standard is dismissed for having no implementations yet. Every wireless specification is an engineering treatment of this result, and propagation, attenuation and antenna design are applied Maxwell whether the engineer knows it or not.
Also known as: maxwell, maxwell's equations