Louis-Victor de Broglie was a French physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1929 in Physics for his discovery of the wave nature of electrons.

His 1924 doctoral thesis, Recherches sur la théorie des quanta (Research on Quantum Theory), De Broglie introduced his theory of electron waves. This included the wave-particle duality theory of matter, based on the work of Einstein and Planck. This research culminated in the de Broglie hypothesis stating that any moving particle or object had an associated wave. De Broglie thus helped create a new field in physics, the mécanique ondulatoire, or wave mechanics, uniting the physics of light and matter. For this he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1929. Among the applications of this work has been the development of electron microscopes to get much better image resolution than optical ones, because of shorter wavelengths of electrons compared with photon.

The Academie des Sciences awarded de Broglie in 1929 the Henri Poincaré medal (awarded for the first time), then in 1932, the Albert I of Monaco prize. In 1952 the first Kalinga Prize was awarded to him by UNESCO for his efforts to explain aspects of modern physics to the layman. In 1956 he received the gold medal of the French National Scientific Research Centre. de Broglie also made important contributions to the fostering of international scientific co-operation.

Elected a member of the Academy of Sciences of the French Institute in 1933, Louis de Broglie was its Permanent Secretary for the mathematical sciences beginning in 1942.