page_title: George Green (mathematician)
section_title: Final years and posthumous fame
hierarchical_section_title: George Green (mathematician) / Final years and posthumous fame
caption_attribution_description: English: The grave stone of George Green and Sarah Green parents of George Green Professor of Mathematics, and Green's Theorem, at Caius College Cambridge in the cemetery of St Stephen's Church, Sneinton, Nottingham.
context_page_description: George Green was a British mathematical physicist who wrote An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism in 1828. The essay introduced several important concepts, among them a theorem similar to the modern Green's theorem, the idea of potential functions as currently used in physics, and the concept of what are now called Green's functions. Green was the first person to create a mathematical theory of electricity and magnetism and his theory formed the foundation for the work of other scientists such as James Clerk Maxwell, William Thomson, and others. His work on potential theory ran parallel to that of Carl Friedrich Gauss.
  Green's life story is remarkable in that he was almost entirely self-taught. He received only about one year of formal schooling as a child, between the ages of 8 and 9.
context_section_description: In his final years at Cambridge, Green became rather ill, and in 1840 he returned to Sneinton, only to die a year later. There are rumours that at Cambridge, Green had "succumbed to alcohol", and some of his earlier supporters, such as Sir Edward Bromhead, tried to distance themselves from him.
   
  Green's work was not well known in the mathematical community during his lifetime. Besides Green himself, the first mathematician to quote his 1828 work was the Briton Robert Murphy (1806–1843) in his 1833 work. In 1845, four years after Green's death, Green's work was rediscovered by the young William Thomson (then aged 21), later known as Lord Kelvin, who popularised it for future mathematicians. According to the book "George Green" by D.M. Cannell, William Thomson noticed Murphy's citation of Green's 1828 essay but found it difficult to locate Green's 1828 work; he finally got some copies of Green's 1828 work from William Hopkins in 1845.
  In 1871 N. M. Ferrers assembled The Mathematical Papers of the late George Green for publication.
  Green's work on the motion of waves in a canal (resulting in what is known as Green's law) anticipates the WKB approximation of quantum mechanics, while his research on light-waves and the properties of the Aether produced what is now known as the Cauchy-Green tensor. Green's theorem and functions were important tools in classical mechanics, and were revised by Schwinger's 1948 work on electrodynamics that led to his 1965 Nobel prize (shared with Feynman and Tomonaga). Green's functions later also proved useful in analysing superconductivity. On a visit to Nottingham in 1930, Albert Einstein commented that Green had been 20 years ahead of his time. The theoretical physicist Julian Schwinger who used Green's functions in his ground-breaking works, published a tribute entitled "The Greening of Quantum Field Theory: George and I" in 1993.
  The George Green Library at the University of Nottingham is named after him, and houses the majority of the university's science and engineering Collection. The George Green Institute for Electromagnetics Research, a research group in the University of Nottingham engineering department, is also named after him. In 1986, Green's Windmill was restored to working order. It now serves both as a working example of a 19th-century windmill and as a museum and science centre dedicated to Green.
  Westminster Abbey has a memorial stone for Green in the nave adjoining the graves of Sir Isaac Newton and Lord Kelvin.
  His work and influence on nineteenth century applied physics had been largely forgotten until the publication of his biography by Mary Cannell in 1993.
caption: The grave stone of George Green and Catherine Green parents of George Green Professor of Mathematics at Caius College Cambridge
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