George Green (mathematician)

George Green (14 July 1793 – 31 May 1841) was a British mathematical physicist. Despite being almost entirely self-taught, having received only about one year of formal schooling as a child, between the ages of 8 and 9, Green made a number of key contributions to mathematical physics. He is now best remembered for his Essay on electricity and magnetism of 1828, in which he introduced an early version of Green's theorem in vector calculus, the notion of potential functions as currently used in physics, and a method of solving differential equations called Green's functions. This paper formed the foundation for the work of later scientists such as James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), among others. His work on potentials ran parallel to that of Carl Friedrich Gauss. Green also studied hydrodynamics, acoustics, and optics.