Sir George Stokes, 1st Baronet
Sir George Gabriel Stokes, 1st Baronet, FRS (/stoʊks/; 13 August 1819 – 1 February 1903) was an Irish physicist and mathematician. Born in County Sligo, Ireland, Stokes spent all of his career at the University of Cambridge, where he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1849 until his death in 1903. As a physicist, Stokes made seminal contributions to fluid mechanics, including the Navier–Stokes equations; and to physical optics, with notable works on polarization and fluorescence. As a mathematician, he popularised "Stokes' theorem" in vector calculus and contributed to the theory of asymptotic expansions. Stokes, along with Felix Hoppe-Seyler, first demonstrated the oxygen transport function of haemoglobin, and showed colour changes produced by the aeration of haemoglobin solutions.
George Stokes
1 February 1903 (aged 83)
Smith's Prize (1841)
Rumford Medal (1852)
Actonian Prize (1886)
Copley Medal (1893)
Mathematics and physics
Pembroke College, Cambridge
Stokes was made a baronet by the British monarch in 1889. In 1893 he received the Royal Society's Copley Medal, then the most prestigious scientific prize in the world, "for his researches and discoveries in physical science". He represented Cambridge University in the British House of Commons from 1887 to 1892, sitting as a Conservative. Stokes also served as president of the Royal Society from 1885 to 1890 and was briefly the Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Stokes's extensive correspondence and his work as Secretary of the Royal Society has led him to be referred to as a gatekeeper of Victorian science, with his contributions surpassing his own published papers. [1]
Personal life[edit]
Stokes married Mary Susanna Robinson, the only daughter of Irish astronomer Rev Thomas Romney Robinson, at St Patrick's Cathedral, Armagh on 4 July 1857. They had five children: Arthur Romney, who inherited the baronetcy; Susanna Elizabeth, who died in infancy; Isabella Lucy (Mrs Laurence Humphry) who contributed the personal memoir of her father in "Memoir and Scientific Correspondence of the Late George Gabriel Stokes, Bart"; Dr William George Gabriel, physician, a troubled man who committed suicide aged 30 while temporarily insane; and Dora Susanna, who died in infancy. His male line and hence his baronetcy have since become extinct.
Volumes I-V of Mathematical and Physical Papers (1880-1905)
Title page to Volume I of Mathematical and Physical Papers (1880)
Table of contents to Volume I of Mathematical and Physical Papers (1880)
First page of Volume I of Mathematical and Physical Papers (1880)
Stokes's mathematical and physical papers (see external links) were published in a collected form in five volumes; the first three (Cambridge, 1880, 1883, and 1901) under his own editorship, and the two last (Cambridge, 1904 and 1905) under that of Sir Joseph Larmor, who also selected and arranged the Memoir and Scientific Correspondence of Stokes published at Cambridge in 1907.[65]