George Green: Mathematician and Physicist, 1793-1841

Download or read book George Green: Mathematician and Physicist, 1793-1841 written by D. M. Cannell and published by SIAM. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mathematicians and lay people alike will enjoy this fascinating book that details the life of George Green, a pioneer in the application of mathematics to physical problems. Green was a mathematical physicist who spent most of the first 40 years of his life working not as a physicist but as a miller in his father's grain mill. Green received only four terms of formal schooling, and at the age of nine he had surpassed his teachers. Green studied mathematics in his spare time and in 1828 published his most famous work, An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism. It was in this essay that the famous Green's Theorem and Green's functions first appeared. Although this work was largely ignored during his lifetime, it is now considered of major importance in modern physics.