George Green (mathematician)
Green was born and lived for most of his life in the English town of Sneinton, Nottinghamshire, now part of the city of Nottingham.
Recognizing the young Green's above average intellect, and being in a strong financial situation due to his successful bakery, his father enrolled him in March 1801 at Robert Goodacre's Academy in Upper Parliament Street.
In 1773 George's father moved to Nottingham, which at the time had a reputation for being a pleasant town with open spaces and wide roads.
By 1831, however, the population had increased nearly five times, in part due to the budding Industrial Revolution, and the city became known as one of the worst slums in England.
There were frequent riots by starving workers, often associated with special hostility towards bakers and millers on the suspicion that they were hiding grain to drive up food prices.
It was published privately at the author's expense, because he thought it would be presumptuous for a person like himself, with no formal education in mathematics, to submit the paper to an established journal.
The wealthy landowner and mathematician Sir Edward Bromhead bought a copy and encouraged Green to do further work in mathematics.
The young Green, now thirty-six years old, consequently was able to use this wealth to abandon his miller duties and pursue mathematical studies.
Members of the Nottingham Subscription Library who knew Green repeatedly insisted that he obtain a proper University education.
[5] He was particularly insecure about his lack of knowledge of Greek and Latin, which were prerequisites, but it turned out not to be as hard for him to learn these as he had envisaged, as the degree of mastery required was not as high as he had expected.
Even without his stellar academic standing, the Society had already read and made note of his Essay and three other publications, so Green was welcomed.
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 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).
Westminster Abbey has a memorial stone for Green in the nave adjoining the graves of Sir Isaac Newton and Lord Kelvin.
Toplis was an advocate of the continental school of mathematics, and fluent in French, having translated Laplace's celebrated work on celestial mechanics.
