Jacopo Bertolotti#PhysicsFactlet
While electrodynamics is well understood, there aren't many scattering problems we can actually solve. A plane wave scattering from a uniform dielectric sphere is one of those few, and the solution was originally found by Gustav Mie in 1908.
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The solution is extremely elegant (albeit cumbersome), but not very practical for larger spheres, as it takes the form of a summation, and the number of terms we need to take into account grows fast with the radius.
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Nevertheless it has become the prototype for all scattering solutions, and it has been extended to coated spheres, metallic spheres, birefringent spheres, ellipsoids etc etc.
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In the animation: the scattered field from a uniform, dielectric disk (the 2D equivalent of the Mie solution). The source is from the bottom, and the (linear) polarization is assumed to be out of the plane.
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