Electrical phenomena attracted the attention of European thinkers as early as the17th century. Beginning as a mathematically oriented science, the field has remained primarily in that form; mathematical predication often precedes laboratory demonstration. The most noteworthy pioneers include Wilhelm Gilbert and Georg Simon Ohm of Germany, Hans Christian Orsted of Denmark, Andre-Marie Ampere of France, Alessandro Volta of Italy, Joseph Henry of the United States, and Michael Faraday of England. Electrical engineering may be said to have emerged as a discipline in 1864 when the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell summarized the basic laws of electricity in mathematical form and predicted that radiation of electromagnetic energy would occur in a form that later became known as radio waves. In 1887 the German physicist Heinrich Hertz experimentally demonstrated the existence of radio waves.