Since Galileo used his pulse to measure the time period of a swinging chandelier in the 17th
century, pendulums have fascinated scientists. It was not until Stokes’ (1851 Camb. Phil. Soc. 9
8–106) (whose interest was spurred by the pendulur time pieces of the mid 19th century) treatise on
viscous flow that a theoretical framework for the drag on a sphere at low Reynolds number was laid
down. Stokes’ famous drag law has been used to determine two fundamental physical constants—the
charge on an electron and Avogadro’s constant—and has been used in theories which have won three
Nobel prizes. Considering its illustrious history it is then not surprising that the flow past a
sphere and its two-dimensional analog, the flow past a cylinder, form the starting point of teaching
flow past a rigid body in undergraduate level fluid mechanics courses. Usually starting with the
two-dimensional potential flow past a cylinder, students progress to the three-dimensional potential
…