Everest was largely responsible for surveying the meridian arc from the southernmost point of India north to Nepal, a distance of about 2,400 kilometres (1,500 mi), a task that took from 1806 to 1841 to complete.

His father was a solicitor and justice of the peace, part of a "Greenwich family of long standing", and was successful enough to acquire a large estate in south Wales.

Everest's work came to the attention of Colonel William Lambton, the leader of the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS), who appointed him as his chief assistant.

Everest was prone to suffer from poor health, however, and the effects of a bout of fever and rheumatism left him half paralysed.

Most of his free time was spent lobbying the East India Company for better equipment and studying the methods used by the Ordnance Survey; he frequently corresponded with Thomas Frederick Colby.

He made the acquaintance of a learned Brahman who taught him — not the details of his own ritual, as European missionaries do, but — the essential factor in all true religion, the secret of how man may hold communion with the Infinite Unknown.It is very likely he introduced Indian thought to others as well: Some time about 1825, he came to England for two or three years, and made a fast and lifelong friendship with Herschel and with Babbage, who was then quite young.(.)

But no one under his influence could continue to believe in anything in the Bible being specially sacred, except the two elements which it has in common with other sacred books: the knowledge of our relation to others and of man's power to hold direct converse with the unseen truth.In June 1830, Everest returned to India to continue his work on the GTS, and was simultaneously appointed Surveyor General of India.

The arc from Cape Commorin to the northern border of British India was finally completed in 1841, under the supervision of Andrew Scott Waugh.

[13] In 1845, Everest was a passenger on the first voyage of the SS Great Britain,[16] which was the first crossing of any ocean on the world by a screw propelled steamship.

In 1847, Everest published An Account of the Measurement of Two Sections of the Meridional Arc of India, for which he was awarded a medal by the Royal Astronomical Society.

Everest was promoted to colonel in 1854, made a Commander of the Order of the Bath in February 1861,[17] and created a Knight Bachelor in March 1861.

[18] He died at his home in Hyde Park Gardens on 1 December 1866, and was buried in St Andrew's Church, Hove, near Brighton.

He was, however, responsible for hiring Andrew Scott Waugh, who made the first formal observations of the mountain, and Radhanath Sikdar, who calculated its height.

Other scholars of India put forward native names that they believed to be correct, such as Brian Houghton Hodgson's "Deva-dhunga" and Hermann Schlagintweit's "Gaurisankar".

George's first younger brother was Robert Everest, chaplain to the East India Company and author of A Journey Through the United States and Part of Canada.

[23] Lancelot's eldest son, Cyril Feilding Everest, enlisted in the Canadian Infantry on 17 November 1914 and was killed in action on 9 October 1916 at the Battle of the Somme.

Alicia's son, Leonard Boole Stott, studied medicine and became a pioneer in the treatment and control of tuberculosis, work for which he was later appointed an OBE[28] Mary Boole's daughter Margaret was the mother of Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor OM, a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, a renowned mathematician and physicist, and a major figure in fluid dynamics and wave theory.