George Gabriel Stokes

George Gabriel Stokes

Sir George Gabriel Stokes, 1st Baronet PRS (born August 13, 1819 in Skreen , County Sligo , † February 1, 1903 in Cambridge ) was an Irish mathematician and physicist .

Youth and education

George Stokes' father, Gabriel Stokes, was the Protestant pastor of the parish of Skreen, County Sligo, on the west coast of Ireland. His mother, Elizabeth Haughton, was the daughter of a Church clergyman, so George grew up in a very religious environment. He was the youngest of six children and his three older brothers all wanted to be priests. Since his father had studied at Trinity College Dublin , he was able to teach George Latin. Before he went to school, he was tutored by a secretary from his father's ward in Skreen. In 1832 he left Skreen and attended Rev. RH Wall's school on Hume Street in Dublin for three years . He lived with his uncle John Stokes during this time; during those three years his father died.

In 1835, at the age of 16, George Stokes moved to England and entered Bristol College in Bristol. The two years Stokes spent in this college were the most important in preparation for his studies at Cambridge. The rector of the university, Dr. Jerrard, was an Irishman who had attended Cambridge University with William Stokes, one of George's older brothers. Dr. Jerrard was a mathematician himself, but Stokes was tutored in mathematics by Francis Newman, brother of John Henry Newman , later Cardinal Newman, the leader of the Oxford Movement in the Church of England, founded in 1833. Stoke's talent for mathematics was already evident during his studies at Bristol College, as he won prizes in mathematics.

Live and act

Stokes studied from 1837 in Pembroke College at Cambridge University . In his sophomore year, he took classes from William Hopkins , who prepared ambitious math students to become the best graduate of their year (Senior Wrangler). In this specialized form of tutoring, Hopkins was exceptionally successful and received the honorary title of Senior Wrangler Maker . He also succeeded in doing this with Stokes, who graduated in 1841.

It was William Hopkins who advised Stokes to do research in hydrodynamics , and indeed this was the area in which Stokes began to work. In addition to Hopkins advice, Stokes was also inspired by the recent work of George Green .

Stokes published work on the movement of incompressible fluids in 1842 and 1843 , particularly on the steady movement of incompressible fluids in 1842. After completing this research project, he discovered that Jean Marie Constant Duhamel (1797–1872) had already obtained similar results. However, because Duhamel had worked on the distribution of heat in solids , Stokes decided that his results in another situation were sufficiently justifiable for publication.

It was not much different with his investigations, in which he investigated internal friction in moving liquids. After deriving the correct equations of motion, Stokes had to discover that he was again not the first to receive the equations, since Claude Louis Navier (1785-1836), Siméon Denis Poisson (1781-1840) and Adhémar Jean Claude Barré de Saint -Venant (1797–1886) had come to similar results. Again, Stokes decided that his results had been obtained under different conditions, and in 1845 he published On the theories of the internal friction of fluids in motion . At Cambridge, little was known about the work of mathematicians on the continent at the time. In 1846 Stokes presented his report on recent researches in hydrodynamics to the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

In 1849 Stokes was appointed Lucas Professor of Mathematics . The Lucasian Chair was paid very poorly, so Stokes was forced to make extra money, and he did so by accepting an additional position, namely the Chair of Physics at the Government School of Mines in London, which had been founded in 1851.

In 1854, Stokes suggested that the Fraunhofer lines (he discovered black lines in the color spectrum ) could be caused by atoms in the outer layers of the sun, which absorb certain wavelengths. In the priority disputes that followed Gustav Robert Kirchhoff (1824–1887) and Robert Wilhelm Bunsens (1811–1899) discoveries, it was pointed out, among other things, that Stokes was already about 10 years before this point in time in his lectures and with William Thomson (1824–1899). 1907) pointed out the coincidence of the yellow sodium lines with the bright lines of the sodium flame and interpreted this as a resonance phenomenon.

From 1851 he was a member and from 1854 also secretary of the Royal Society ; between 1885 and 1890 Stokes was its president. Since Isaac Newton , Stokes was the only person who had three offices:

• Lucasischer Professor of Mathematics
• President of the Royal Society
• Member of Parliament for the University

Stokes worked in the field of pure mathematics as well as mathematical and experimental physics . His theoretical investigations were mainly concerned with hydrodynamics , the theory of electromagnetic wave propagation and the theory of sound propagation . His experiments had mainly to do with the phenomena of light.

An important piece of work by Stokes deals with fluorescence (the name came from Stokes), the nature of which he was the first to recognize. He demonstrated that the fluorescent substances themselves become luminous by absorbing the incident light. This causes the molecules of the substrate to vibrate. With this work Stokes established the theory of the absorption of light (see Stokes shift ). As a result, he dealt with spectral analysis and examined the ultraviolet part of the spectrum .

Named after Stokes are:

• the Stokes relations ,
• the Navier-Stokes equations ,
• the Stokes equations related to the Navier-Stokes equations ,
• the Stokes-Einstein equation ,
• the Stokes theorem ,
• the Stokes CGS unit ,
• the Stokes friction ,
• the Stokes parameters ,
• the Stokes radius, see hydrodynamic radius ,
• the Stokes number ,
• the Stokes shift ,
• the law of Stokes ,
• the Stokes shock wave formula
• an impact crater on the moon, see Stokes (moon crater) ,
• an impact crater on Mars, see Stokes (Mars crater) ,
• the asteroid (30566) Stokes ,
• the Stokes operator
• the mineral stokesite .

Today, however, measurements are still often made in centistokes such as in the UBBELOHDE viscometer . The unit used here is m² / s and has been called Stokes (St) since 1928 (in honor of the Irish physicist STOKES). The hundredth part is a centistoke (cSt). The Stokes unit has not officially been valid since 1978.

Stokes was since 1865 Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh . In 1874 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1883 to the National Academy of Sciences . In 1889 he was appointed baronet , and in 1888 a foreign member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . Since 1859 he was a corresponding and since 1899 a foreign member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences . He was also a corresponding and external member ( associé étranger ) of the Académie des sciences .

family

After a lengthy exchange of letters with his fiancée, in which he stated that he would devote his life to science, Stokes married Mary Susanna Robinson, daughter of Rev. Thomas Romney Robinson, the astronomer at the Armagh Observatory in Ireland on July 4, 1857 . They soon moved to a house on Lensfield Road they simply called Lensfield (now the Museum of the Scott Polar Research Institute ).

Stokes and his wife, Mary Susanna Stokes, who died on December 30, 1899 at the age of 75, had five children:

• Arthur Romney (1858-1916),
• Susanna Elizabeth (1859-63),
• Isabella Lucy (1861-1934),
• William George Gabriel (1863–93),

and Dora Susanna (c. 1868-1868).

Stokes lived with his daughter Isabella Lucy for the last few years. He died on February 1, 1903 and was buried four days later in Mill Road cemetery, Cambridge. His wife and two children, Susanna and William, are also buried in Mill Road Cemetery.

His eldest son Arthur Romney Stokes followed him as a second baron (2nd baronet).

Fonts

• Mathematical and physical papers . 5 volumes. Cambridge 1880-1905.
• Mathematical And Physical Papers - III. 1901; archive.org .
• The light . Leipzig 1888, lectures in German (Original title: Burnett Lectures: On Light . London 1884–87).
• On Light: Delivered in Three Courses at Aberdeen in November 1883, December 1884 and November 1884 (Burnett Lectures) ; Text archive - Internet Archive .
• Natural Theology (Gifford Lectures). 2 volumes. 1891, 1893; archive.org .
• Memoirs presented to the Cambridge philosophical society on the occasion of the jubilee of Sir George Gabriel Stokes, bart., Hon. LL. D., Hon. SC. D., Lucasian professor . Cambridge University Press, 1900; Text archive - Internet Archive .
• Memoir and scientific correspondence of the late Sir George Gabriel Stokes , bart., Selected and arranged by Joseph Larmor. Volume I. Cambridge University Press, 1907; Text archive - Internet Archive .
• Memoir and scientific correspondence of the late Sir George Gabriel Stokes, bart., Selected and arranged by Joseph Larmor. Volume II. Cambridge University Press, 1907; Text archive - Internet Archive .

literature

• Willy Hergesell: About GG Stokes' formula for calculating regional deviations of the geoid from the normal spheroid: a contribution to the more recent studies on the shape of the earth's surface . DuMont Schauberg, Strasbourg 1890 ( digitized ).
• Alexander Macfarlane: Lectures on ten British physicists of the nineteenth century . John Wiley & sons, London / New York 1919; Text archive - Internet Archive .
• Stokes, Sir George Gabriel . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 25 : Shuválov - Subliminal Self . London 1911, p. 951 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).
• Stokes, George Gabriel . In: Sidney Lee (Ed.): Dictionary of National Biography . Suppl. 2, Volume 3:  Neil - Young. MacMillan & Co, Smith, Elder & Co., New York City / London 1912, pp 421 - 424 (English).

Web links

Commons : George Gabriel Stokes  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about George Gabriel Stokes in the catalog of the German National Library
• Papers of Sir George Gabriel Stokes (Add. MS 7656) now in Cambridge University Library
• Josipa Petrunic: Stokes Biography . University of Edinburgh
• Sir George Gabriel Stokes, 1st Baronet. In: Encyclopædia Britannica . (English). 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Pembroke College ( Memento of the original dated August 10, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
2. ^ History of the Royal School of Mines - Timeline .
3. ↑ Fraunhofer: Black Lines in Sunlight ( Memento of the original from May 3, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. - Milestones in science and technology . 
4. ↑ Kirchhoff: Ladder systems and spectral lines in the Universial Lexicon.
5. ↑ On the Change of refrangibility of Light. GG Stokes in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 142. (1852) pp. 463-562.
6. ↑ kinematic viscosity ( memento of the original from July 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF file) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed April 12, 2020 . 
8. ^ List of members since 1666: Letter S. Académie des sciences, accessed on March 5, 2020 (French). 
9. ^ The Armagh Observatory
10. ↑ Scott Polar Institute ( Memento of the original from July 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
11. ↑ Millroad Cemetery ( Memento of the original from July 28, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.