Abstract
As a mathematician, George Green is among the immortals; as a man he sank back almost at the moment of his death into the obscurity from which he had startlingly emerged. From a volume of studies published in 1946 as a tribute to George Sarton, Mr. Gwynedd Green, of University College, Nottingham, has separated a biography of the miller-scholar who graduated as fourth wrangler at the age of forty-four, nine years after the private publication of an incomparable masterpiece. Property is located, wills are transcribed, correspondence between Kelvin and Crelle is reproduced, and there are notes on every traceable name in Green's family tree and on all but eight of the fifty-two subscribers to the printing of the famous “Essay”; bibliographical information is thorough, but mention should surely have been made of the collected edition of Green's papers which was prepared by Ferrers for Caius in 1871 and reproduced photographically in Paris in 1903. The circuihstances of Green's life both in Nottingham and at Cambridge have been investigated once for all from local sources with an industry beyond praise, and if a condescending patron and a resentful daughter are more vivid in the story than the central figure himself, this is because no contemporary portrait or character sketch has been found and the author does not attempt imaginary reconstructions. It is sad to learn from a note added in manuscript that the mill in which Green laboured and studied was reduced to a shell by fire in July last.
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George Green, 1793–1841. Nature 160, 561 (1947). https://doi.org/10.1038/160561d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/160561d0