George Green was baptized in St Mary's Church, Nottingham, on 14 July 1793, either on his actual birthday or on the day following. The only son of a semi-literate baker, also called George Green, he was sent at the age of 8 to Robert Goodacre's Academy in Nottingham, since he showed 'an intense application to Mathematics'. After four terms, he had learnt all his masters could teach him and his father set him to work in the bakery. In 1807 the baker built a windmill in Sneinton, a village just outside the town boundary and at 14 George started an apprenticeship under his father's mill manager, William Smith.

When he was 30, Green joined the Nottingham Subscription Library, a gentlemen's club and a centre of cultural activity. Five years later he published in 1828 his 'Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism'. Of the 51 known subscribers, the most influential was Sir Edward Bromhead of Lincoln (see Influences). Two years later Bromhead became Green's patron and sponsored the publication of three more papers in Cambridge and Edinburgh (see List of Works p2). Green's father had died early in 1829; Green was now released from milling, having inherited sufficient income to devote his time to study.

Green, now aged 40, finally entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (Bromhead's own college) in 1833. He took the Mathematical Tripos in January 1837, emerging as Fourth Wrangler. He stayed on at Caius till spring 1840. He was elected Fellow in October 1839 by which time he had published 6 more papers in the Cambridge Transactions. In failing health he returned to Nottingham in early 1840 and died in Sneinton on 31 May 1841, aged 47. He was buried with his parents in St Stephen's churchyard, opposite Green's Mill (see George Green's grave).

Green left a common-law wife, Jane Smith, the daughter of his father's mill manager, and 7 children, leaving ample provision for all. The youngest, Clara, aged 13 months on her father's death, died in 1919, when the family was presumed to be extinct. Her eldest sister, Jane, however, married and had two children: the descendants of her son were identified in the 1970s and 1980s.

Rediscovery

Green died in obscurity, his work unknown in Nottingham and apparently soon forgotten by Cambridge contemporaries. William Thomson, the future Lord Kelvin (1824-1907) graduated in Cambridge in 1845, eager to begin research into the problems of electricity and magnetism. Having heard of Green's Essay, he finally located copies in the possession of his tutor, William Hopkins, to whom Green had presumably presented them. Thomson took them to Paris where Liouville, Chasles, Sturm and others shared his excitement at finding Green's solutions to their problems. Crelle printed the Essay in his Journal in 1850, 1852 and 1854 and Green's functions became widespread in Europe.

Green's Essay was not republished in England till 1871 when Caius College promoted the publication of the Collected Papers of George Green, edited by N H Ferrers.