Sir George Gabriel Stokes, 1st Baronet, (; 13 August 1819 – 1 February 1903), was a
mathematician,
physicist, politician and theologian. Born in Ireland, Stokes spent all of his career at
University of Cambridge, where he served as the
Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1849 until his death in 1903. Stokes made seminal contributions to
fluid dynamics (including the
Navier–Stokes equations),
optics, and
mathematical physics (including the first version of what is now known as
Stokes' theorem). He was secretary, then president, of the
Royal Society.