Sir George Stokes, 1st Baronet

Born in County Sligo in 1819, Stokes spent his entire career at Cambridge, ascending to the Lucasian Professorship in 1849 at age 30. He gave fluid dynamics the Navier–Stokes equations, advanced optics through work on polarisation and fluorescence, and popularised the vector calculus result that bears his name. With Felix Hoppe-Seyler, he demonstrated that haemoglobin carries oxygen, watching the colour shift as solutions aerated. From 1885 to 1890 he led the Royal Society, and later sat in Parliament for Cambridge as a Conservative. His correspondence and editorial work—deciding what entered…