Sir George Stokes, 1st Baronet

George Stokes married Mary Susanna Robinson on July 4, 1857 at St Patrick's Cathedral in Armagh. The couple had five children, namely, Arthur, Susanna, Isabella, William and Dora.

His daughters Susanna Elizabeth and Dora Susanna died in infancy, while his son Dr William G Gabriel committed suicide when he was 30. Another son, Arthur became a baronet and his daughter Isabelle Lucy contributed to her father's personal memoir.

He died on February 1, 1903 at Cambridge and was buried in the Mill Road cemetery.

George Stokes was born on August 13, 1819 in Skreen, County Sligo, Ireland in an evangelical Protestant family. His father, Gabriel Stokes, was the rector of the parish of Skreen and his mother’s name was Elizabeth Haughton.

He was the youngest of six children. He had three brothers and two sisters. His brothers who went onto become priests later on.

He received his primary education through his father and a clerk in his father's parish. He left for Dublin in 1832 and attended the Reverend R H Wall's school in Hume Street for three years.

He moved to England in 1835 and enrolled at the University of Bristol where he won many mathematics prizes. The years at Bristol were important ones in preparing him for his studies at Cambridge.

He entered the Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1837 and graduated four years later as a senior wrangler and the first Smith's prizeman. Upon graduation, the college gave him a Fellowship.

In the early 1840s he published papers on the steady motion of incompressible fluids, equilibrium and motion of elastic solids and internal friction in a moving fluid and its effect on a pendulum.

He derived an expression, 'Strokes' Law', for the frictional force exerted on spherical objects with very small Reynolds numbers. The viscosity of any liquid can be calculated from the expression if the terminal velocity, size and density of the sphere and density of the liquid are known.

In-between 1845 and 1849 he published several papers on the aberration of light, bands in a spectrum and diffraction. He mentioned in a paper on the dynamical theory of diffraction that the plane of polarisation must be perpendicular to the direction of propagation.

He was involved in many railway accident investigations and said that the two main reasons for the collapsing of bridges were the extensive use of cast-iron and effects of wind loads on the bridge. Because of the observations he made on the Dee bridge disaster in May 1847, he was appointed a member of the subsequent Royal Commission.

He wrote a paper in 1849 about the varying values of gravity at the surface of the earth and one on the numerical calculation of a class of definite integrals and infinite series, in 1850.

Through his extensive research on fluid dynamics, he explained how ripples and waves in water subside, how clouds remain suspended in air and the minimum required skin resistance for ships.

He gave 'Stokes' Law', which is used to determine the frictional force on spherical objects with low Reynolds number. The expression can be used to calculate the viscosity of any fluid.