[3][4] Green was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and grew up in a low-income project in Brooklyn where he attended local schools.

[5] His grandfather, Mordecai Grunglaz (became Green in the United States), was driven out of Belarus in 1910 for his involvement in violent resistance to a pogrom that led to the death of a Cossack.

[6] He has a sister, Dorothy Lederman, and a brother, Stuart Green, who is founder and director of the New Jersey Coalition for Bullying Awareness and Prevention,[7] a networking organization formed in 2000 in response to the bullying-related tragedy at Columbine.

[8] After graduation in 1958 he worked as a technician for Pfizer Corporation in Brooklyn and then entered the United States Army for six months of active duty in Fort McClellan, Alabama, teaching aspects of chemical and biological warfare.

He left NYU in 1964 to accompany Professor Kurt Mislow to Princeton University, where Green was awarded a National Institutes of Health (NIH) fellowship.

He was visiting professor in 1978 at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, and National Chemical Laboratory, Poona, India, having been appointed Indo-American Scholar under the Fulbright Program.

He was attracted to use stereochemical methods to explore a system in which precise kinetic measurements could be made under conditions where there was no intermolecular exchange of energy and therefore an impossible to define temperature.

His work was continuously supported by the General Medical Sciences Program of the NIH, and to some extent by the Petroleum Research Fund administered by the American Chemical Society.

He is rated a popular teacher, having instructed several thousand undergraduates in his career and guided the academic output of the doctoral theses of nineteen graduate students.

[21][22] Some of the more frequently cited include: Books: While assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Green became involved in the antiwar movement (Vietnam).