Sir George Gabriel Stokes, Profesor Lucasiano de Matemática

Sir George Gabriel Stokes (1819-1903), 13° Profesor Lucasiano de Matemática, quien durante varias décadas fue considerado como el principal científico del mundo.

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Did you know why small water droplets (or ice crystals) can remain suspended in air, as clouds, until they grow to a critical size and start falling as rain (or snow)? Today our "scientist of the day" is the man who explained this phenomenon with his law. 

It's the birthday of Sir #GeorgeGabrielStokes, the man who established the science of hydrodynamics with his law of #viscosity --

(Scientist of the Day - 13 August) 

Stokes spent all of his career at the University of Cambridge, where he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1849 until his death in 1903. He made seminal contributions to :-
1) fluid mechanics, including the Navier-Stokes equations & Stokes' law.
2) physical optics, with notable works on #polarization and fluorescence. 
As a mathematician, he popularised "Stokes' theorem" in #vector calculus. 

The Navier-Stokes equations (look the image) are useful because they describe the physics of many phenomena of scientific and engineering interest. They may be used to model the weather, ocean currents, water flow in a pipe and air flow around a wing. The equations help with the design of aircraft and cars, the study of blood flow, the design of power stations, the analysis of pollution, and many other things.

In 1851, Stokes derived an expression, now known as Stokes' law (look the shown image), for the frictional force – also called drag force – exerted on spherical objects with very small #Reynolds numbers in a viscous fluid. With this law, he established the science of hydrodynamics. 

In 1851, Stokes was elected to the Royal Society and 3 years later became its secretary, a post he held for 30 years until he was elected president. He thus became the first man since Sir #IsaacNewton to hold the three positions of Lucasian Professor, secretary, and then president of the Royal Society. Stokes was created a #baronet in 1889. The stokes, a unit of kinematic viscosity (in the CGS system), was named after him in 1928.

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Cosmological Astrophysics, 13 de agosto de 2022.

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