Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/100



Author:George Gabriel Stokes was born August 13, 1819, at Skreen, County Sligo, Ireland. His father was the rector of the parish, a clergyman of the Church of England in Ireland. When twelve years of age he was sent to a school in Dublin and two years later to Bristol College in the West of England. At this time the principal of that college was Dr. Jerrard whose researches on the solution of equations of the fifth degree were discussed by Sir William Rowan Hamilton at the Bristol meeting of the British Association in 1836. In 1837 young Stokes entered Pembroke College, Cambridge, and four years later graduated as senior wrangler, won the first Smith's prize, and was elected to a fellowship. During all his school and college years he had won distinction in mathematical studies.

He now did what was a great novelty in those days—turned one of his rooms into a physical laboratory. The University had no lecture rooms for its professors, far less laboratories or museums. Being a powerful analyst as well as a skillful experimenter he immediately entered on a period of fruitful scientific production. He chose as channels of publication the two institutions which had been recently inaugurated at Cambridge, namely, the Cambridge Philosophical Society, and the Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal. To the former he contributed two papers on pure mathematical analysis, namely, "on the critical values of the sums of periodic series," based on Fourier's analysis of periodic functions; and another "On the numerical calculation of a class of definite integrals and infinite series," in which he was able to calculate the first