George Green
Sign in to saveBritish mathematical physicist (*1793 – †1841)
Key facts
- Born
- ( 1793-07-14 ) 14 July 1793, Sneinton , Nottinghamshire, England
- Died
- 31 May 1841 (1841-05-31) (aged 47), Nottingham , Nottinghamshire, England
- Alma mater
- Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (BA, 1838)
- Known for
- Green measure Cauchy–Green tensor Green's function Green's identities Green's law Green's matrix Green's theorem Liouville–Green method
- Fields
- Mathematical physics
- Institutions
- Caius College, Cambridge
- Patrons
- Edward Bromhead
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- human
- Given name
- George
- Family name
- Green
- Gender
- male
- Citizenship
- Kingdom of Great Britain
- Place of birth
- Nottingham
- Place of death
- Nottingham
- Occupation
- physicist
- Educated at
- Gonville and Caius College
- Employer
- University of Cambridge
- Languages spoken
- English language
- Field of work
- hydrodynamics
- Image
- George Green (English shipbuilder).jpg
Show 7 more facts
- date of birth
- 1793-07-14
- date of death
- 1841-05-31
- Commons category
- George Green (mathematician)
- name in native language
- George Green
- writing language
- English language
- different from
- George Green
- maintained by WikiProject
- WikiProject Mathematics
via Wikidata · CC0
~22 min read
Encyclopedic overview
George Green (14 July 1793 – 31 May 1841) was a British mathematical physicist. Despite being almost entirely self-taught, having received only about one year of formal schooling as a child, between the ages of 8 and 9, Green made a number of key contributions to mathematical physics. He is now best remembered for his Essay on electricity and magnetism of 1828, in which he introduced an early version of Green's theorem in vector calculus, the notion of potential functions as currently used in physics, and a method of solving differential equations called Green's functions. This paper formed the foundation for the work of later scientists such as William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), among many others. His work on potentials ran parallel to that of Carl Friedrich Gauss.
Green also studied hydrodynamics, acoustics, and optics.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “George Green” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.