 George Gabriel Stokes

George Gabriel Stokes connected fluid viscosity with corrections to precision physical pendulum measurements and with resistance on small moving bodies. His memoir explains why correcting only for buoyancy misses the fluid's inertia and frictional effects. For steady creeping flow of a Newtonian fluid around a rigid sphere, the Stokes drag law is $F=6\pi \mu aU$, where $\mu$ is dynamic viscosity, $a$ is the sphere's radius, and $U$ is its relative speed. The result assumes a no-slip boundary condition and an unbounded surrounding fluid. It connects measured settling or damping with fluid properties.^[ref]

A physicist and mathematician associated with Stokes flow, Stokes' second problem and Stokes theorem.