3. Carl Friedrich Gauss, original name Johann Friedrich Carl Gauss, (born April 30, 1777, Brunswick
[Germany]—died February 23, 1855, Göttingen, Hanover), German mathematician, generally
regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time for his contributions to number
theory, geometry, probability theory, geodesy, planetary astronomy, the theory of functions, and
potential theory (including electromagnetism).
Gauss used his formidable mathematical armoury to analyse the behaviour of electric and magnetic
fields. Using his divergence theorem, which he discovered independently of Joseph-Louis Lagrange,
he formulated two laws in 1835:
• Gauss’s Law, which relates an electric field to the distribution of electric charges that cause it
• Gauss’s Law for Magnetism, which states that magnetic monopoles do not exist
6. Sir George Gabriel Stokes, 1st Baronet, (born Aug. 13, 1819,
Skreen, County Sligo, Ire.—died Feb. 1, 1903, Cambridge,
Cambridgeshire, Eng.), British physicist and mathematician noted
for his studies of the behaviour of viscous fluids, particularly for
his law of viscosity, which describes the motion of a solid sphere
in a fluid, and for Stokes’s theorem, a basic theorem of vector
analysis.
