STOKES, GEORGE GABRIEL, one of the greatest living mathematicians and natural philosophers in Europe, was born, in 1S19, at Skreen, co. Sligo, Ireland; educated at the school of rev. R. H. Wall, D.D., Dublin; afterward at the Bristol college. He entered Pembroke college, Cambridge, in 1837; graduated in 1841, as senior wrangler, and first Smith's prizeman; became fellow of Pembroke in the same year; •and was elected, in 1849, to till, as one of the worthiest of Newton's successors, the Lucasian chair of mathe matics in Cambridge. In 1854, he was appointed secretary to the Royal society.
He is best known, popularly, and by his beautiful discovery of fluorescence (see PHOSPHORESCENCE). His paper On the Change of the Refrangibility of Light, is printed in the Philosophical Transactions for 1652-1853. His recent important physiological application of optical methods to the study of the oxidation of the blood, is noticed under SPECTRUM. But to mathematicians and natural philosophers, Stokes is known
by a number of admirable papers in the Cambridge Philosophical Transactions, the Cam bridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal, and the Philosophical Magazine. In them he has greatly extended and improved the mathematical treatment of questions connected with the distortion of elastic solids, the motion of waves in water, the undulatory theory of light, the summation of series, the internal friction of fluids, etc. Another excellent work by Stokes is his Report on Double Refraction, published in the British association reports for 1862. He was president of the British association at Exeter in 1869; and in 1871 the university of Edinburgh conferred on him the degree of LL.D.