As pointed out by Jan Korringa, the origin of this theory can be traced back to an 1892 paper by Lord Rayleigh. An important mathematical formulation of the theory was made by Paul Peter Ewald. Korringa and Ewald acknowledged the influence on their work of the 1903 doctoral dissertation of Nikolai Kasterin, portions of which were published in German in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Amsterdam under the sponsorship of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes. The MST formalism is widely used for electronic structure calculations as well as diffraction theory, and is the subject of many books.