Kelvin–Stokes theorem
Teorema de Kelvin-Stokes
- Date
- 1850 · confidence high
- Place
- Cambridge, England
- Credited to
- William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and George Gabriel Stokes
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
The result relating the integral of a curl over a surface to the circulation of the field along its boundary first appeared in a letter from William Thomson to Stokes in 1850; Stokes popularized it by setting it as a question on Cambridge's 1854 Smith's Prize exam, which is how it got its common name.
The theorem is named after Stokes even though it was Thomson (Kelvin) who communicated it to him by letter in 1850; hence it is also called the Kelvin–Stokes theorem.
What it led to
- Integral formulation of Maxwell's electromagnetism
- Modern generalized Stokes' theorem on differentiable manifolds