He was graduated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1877 and then studied in Berlin, German Empire, for three years. On his return to the United States, he settled in Boston. In 1887 he became professor of civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was then located in Boston. He remained at MIT until 1909, when he became professor of civil engineering at the Harvard Graduate School of Applied Science. He also served as consulting engineer of the Massachusetts Railroad Commission, and in 1894 became a member of the Boston Transit Commission, becoming its chairman in 1913.

• Notes on Hydraulics (1885)
• “Report on the Water Power of the Atlantic Watershed” in Vol. XVII of the Tenth United States Census
• Notes on Theory of Structures (1893)
• "Technical Education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology" . Popular Science Monthly. Vol. 57. July 1900.
• Conservation of Water by Storage (1915)
• How to Study (1917)^[1]

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Rines, George Edwin, ed. (1920). "Swain, George Fillmore" . Encyclopedia Americana.
• Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). "Swain, George Fillmore" . New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.
• William Hovgaard (1936). "Biographical memoir of George Fillmore Swain 1857-1931" (PDF). Biographical Memoirs. XVII. Fourteenth Memoir. National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

• Works by George Fillmore Swain at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about George Fillmore Swain at Internet Archive

• George F. Swain papers at Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Business School.