George Gabriel Stokes

Sir George Gabriel Stokes was an Irish mathematician and physicist, born at Skreen in County Sligo in 1819, who spent his entire career at the University of Cambridge and was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics for 54 years, from 1849 until his death in 1903. As a physicist he made seminal contributions to fluid mechanics, including the Navier-Stokes equations, and to optics, with notable work on polarisation and fluorescence. As a mathematician he popularised Stokes theorem in vector calculus. With Felix Hoppe-Seyler he showed the oxygen transport function of haemoglobin. He was president of the Royal Society from 1885 to 1890, represented Cambridge University in Parliament from 1887 to 1892 and was briefly Master of Pembroke College.