Gabriel Marcus Green

Background

Gabriel Marcus Green was born on October 19, 1891, in New York City, of German parents.

Education

Green was educated in the public schools. He graduated from the College of the City of New York, in 1911, and then entered Columbia University, receiving his A. M. degree in 1912 and his Ph. D. degree in 1913.

Career

After completing his studies at Columbia, Green taught mathematics for a year in the College of the City of New York and in 1914 was appointed to an instructorship at Harvard. Two years later he was about to be made an assistant professor when his career was cut short by a fatal attack of pneumonia.

At Columbia, he had come under the influence of Professor Kasner, who was then paying special attention to projective differential geometry, and it was in this field that he wrote his doctor’s dissertation, Projective Differential Geometry of Triple Systems of Surfaces, and did most of his subsequent work.

Achievements

• Gabriel Marcus Green was an outstanding mathematician. No American of his years in recent times had given a greater promise in this field, and the sudden termination of his labors was a loss felt by all mathematicians of the United States.

Works

More photos

• book

  • One Hundred Years of Solitude

    ( One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the ri...)

  • Projective Differential Geometry Of Triple Systems Of Surfaces

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

Personality

Green lived long enough to publish only sixteen papers of any moment; these, however, were sufficient to reveal his genius in mathematics as a whole as well as in the domain of pure geometry.

Quotes from others about the person

• “I had been engaged for some time in studying this very subject and was very nearly ready to prepare my results for publication. I wrote to Green, asking him for some of the details of his work, not suspecting that it had been published already, and to my great astonishment received, a few days later, his printed thesis. This thesis made it quite unnecessary for me to publish my own work on the subject. ” - Prof. Wilczynski
  
  “His touch was delicate and his musical intuition fine. Music was a form of expression especially well adapted to his emotional and idealistic temperament. His expression, always sensitive and often serious, had in it a characteristic undertone of cheerfulness and joy, the joy of a man whose faith in life had not been destroyed, and whose belief in his own powers had not been broken. ” - Prof. Wilczynski

Interests

• Like so many mathematicians, Green was an accomplished musician and was especially fond of the piano.

Connections

Green never married.