Australian Dictionary of Biography

Bert Green, c1985

Courtesy of the University of Adelaide

Herbert Sydney Green (1920–1999), mathematical physicist, was born on 17 December 1920 at Ipswich, Suffolk, England, only child of English-born parents Sydney Green, mathematics teacher and coach builder, and his wife Violet Rose, née Hindry. In 1930 the Greens moved to Felixstowe, a port town south-east of Ipswich, where Bert attended the local primary school before winning a scholarship to Felixstowe County School (1932–39). He had congenital hearing loss, inherited from his father, and though less severe in boyhood, he would suffer from severe deafness for most of his life. After achieving outstanding results in his senior school examinations, he was awarded a scholarship to attend the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London (BSc Hons, 1941). He graduated with first-class honours in mathematics and an associateship to the Royal College of Science.

In 1941 Green was recruited into the civil service, and soon transferred to the meteorological office of the Air Ministry. He subsequently received a commission in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve and spent the remainder of World War II as a meteorological officer advising on flying hazards, particularly the icing of aerofoils in weather and at altitude, at the RAF Training Flying Control Centre on the Isle of Man. In September 1945 he was demobilised with the rank of flying officer and joined the research group led by the German-British physicist and mathematician Max Born at the University of Edinburgh (PhD, 1947; DSc, 1949). The next four years were exceptionally productive. He co-authored a book with Born, published articles in international journals, and made his first contribution to understanding the dynamical behaviour of liquids by helping formulate a set of equations known as the BBGKY hierarchy.

Green spent the 1949-50 academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, United States of America. Though it was a successful year, he was uncomfortable with the intensity at which his American colleagues approached research and, given his strong socialist leanings, with the descent into the anti-communist rhetoric of McCarthyism. He declined offers of permanent positions in the United States to spend the 1950-51 academic year at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, led by the Nobel laureate and physicist Erwin Schrödinger. Green moved into new research on the structure of cosmic ray showers, where instruments developed during the war were providing extensive information that needed to be explained. While in Dublin, he renewed his friendship with Marie-Louise (‘Marlies’) Auguste Friedheim, a Dutch citizen of German-Jewish heritage, whom he had first met in 1945 when she travelled to Scotland to work as an au pair in the Born household. They married on 19 March 1951 in a secular ceremony.

In August 1951 Green arrived in Adelaide to take up an appointment as inaugural chair of the newly established department of mathematical physics at the University of Adelaide. After World War II physics departments throughout Australia were grappling with the need to integrate the discoveries of the pre-war and war period into already crowded undergraduate curricula. Green chose not to introduce formal undergraduate teaching at Adelaide until 1959, but instead focused on research and higher degree programs. He also continued his work on cosmic rays with Harry Messel, a friend and colleague from Dublin who had joined him at Adelaide on a senior lectureship before moving to the University of Sydney in 1952, even as his interests shifted towards quantised fields and particle physics. One of his most influential contributions was the invention of parastatistics in 1953, which came close to ‘describing the peculiar statistics of quarks, the fundamental building blocks of matter’ (Hurst 1999, 12).

Green’s research was wide-ranging and driven by intense curiosity. He explored anything that caught his interest, publishing several books and more than 150 refereed papers on various topics, from kinetic theory and statistical mechanics to plasma physics, general relativity, mathematical methods, and biophysics. His lectures on quantum mechanics, compiled in Matrix Mechanics (1965), were published in four languages. In the 1980s his assessment of the environmental risks of a proposed Redcliff petrochemical facility on Spencer Gulf eventually led to the project being abandoned, much to the displeasure of the State Liberal Party government. Later in his career, he wrote on the physics of the brain and mechanisms of consciousness.

Like his father, Green’s hearing had deteriorated considerably in his twenties. Although hampered by the isolation this brought him, he remained involved in university administration, notably as head of department (1951–64, 1967–68, 1971–72, 1975–76, and 1983–84) and dean of the faculty of mathematical sciences (1975). In his role as president of the Australian Mathematical Society (1974–76), he was a staunch supporter of the campaign to free the imprisoned Ukrainian mathematician and Soviet dissident Leonid Plyushch. On his retirement in 1985, he was appointed emeritus professor and honorary visiting research fellow. After a long battle with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, he died on 16 February 1999 at St Andrew’s Hospital. He was survived by his wife and children, Roy and Johanne, and his remains were scattered at Centennial Park crematorium.

Described by a former colleague as a man of considerable self-confidence, who could be both stubborn and idiosyncratic, Green was admired for his originality, breadth of expertise, and moral courage. He generally took pleasure in solitary pursuits such as walking, swimming, and cycling, though he was also a regular concertgoer as well as an enthusiastic player of Go, an East Asian strategy game. Although overlooked for international honours, partly because of the diversity of his achievements and his deafness, he was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences (1954) and the Australian Institute of Physics (1963). He was also a life member of the Royal Zoological Society of South Australia. In 1997 the University of Adelaide established the H S Green prize, awarded annually to the highest placed first-class honours student undertaking a theoretical physics project.