George Gabriel Stokes was born on 13 August 1819 in Skreen, Ireland. A physicist and mathematician, he is known for his studies on the behaviour of viscous fluids and for Stokes’s theorem, a basic hypothesis of vector analysis. Stokes matriculated at Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1837 and graduated Senior Wrangler and first Smith’s prizeman, both prestigious accolades. He was offered a fellowship immediately upon completion of his studies and became the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1849, a post previously held by Sir Isaac Newton.
Secretary of the Royal Society of London for thirty years and president for five, he also represented Cambridge as a parliamentarian at Westminster from 1887 to 1891. Stokes’s major publications and lectures include Mathematical and Physical Papers (1880–1905), On Light: Delivered at Aberdeen University: Burnett Lectures (1887), Natural Theology (1891–1893), ‘The Annual Address of the Victoria Institute: The Perception of Light’ (1895), Röntgen Rays: Memoirs by Röntgen (1899), and (posthumously published) Memoir and Scientific Correspondence of the Late Sir George Gabriel Stokes (1907).
