Donegal / Tyrone / Londonderry / Antrim / Down /

Sligo / Leitrim / Cavan / Fermanagh / Monaghan / Armagh /

Mayo / Roscommon / Longford / Westmeath / Meath / Louth /

Galway / Offaly / Laois / Kildare / Dublin /

Clare / Tipperary / Kilkenny / Carlow / Wicklow /

Kerry / Limerick / Cork / Waterford / Wexford /

(Four-colour map from Wesley Johnston & Patrick Abbot webpage.)

Robert Adrain (1775-1843) was born 30 Sep in Carrickfergus, Antrim, and is believed to have been self taught. Following the 1798 rebellion, he moved to the USA, where he was one of the leading lights of academic mathematics in the early 19th century, publishing the method of least squares before Gauss.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

Physicist, mathematician and engineer William Thomson (1824-1907, later known as Lord Kelvin) was born 24 Jun in Belfast, and was educated at Glasgow and Cambridge. His long career was entirely spent at Glasgow, doing pioneering work on heat, electricity and thermodynamics. He is also remembered for his engineering insights which led to the first successful transatlantic cable.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor Britannica

Theoretical physicist Joseph Larmor (1857-1942) was born 11 Jul in Magheragall, Antrim. Graduating from Queen's College, Belfast, he did his PhD at Cambridge, where he spent most of his career. He studied electricity, dynamics, and thermodynamics. His 1900 book Aether and Matter was influential at the time.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

John Campbell (1862-1924) was born 27 May in Lisburn, Antrim, and was educated at Queen's Belfast and at Oxford. His career was entirely at Oxford, where he was an early supporter of women's education. He worked in Lie algebras and differential geometry, and wrote two influential books.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

Astronomer Alice Everett (1865-1949) was born 15 May in Glasgow, and brought up in Belfast, where her father was professor of natural philosophy at Queen's College. She studied maths there, and at Girton College, Cambridge, but her BA and MA degrees were awarded by the Royal University of Ireland. She worked at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, and later did research in optics and the engineering of early television.

Link: Wikipedia

Mathematical physicist William Morton (1868-1949) was born in Belfast and was educated at Queen's College, Belfast, and at Cambridge. He worked at QUB for four decades, and served as dean.

Links: BBC Bio

Annie Megaw (née McElderry, 1874-1968) was born 4 Sep in Ballymoney, Antrim. She earned her BA and MA in mathematics from Queen's College, Belfast, before the turn of the century, and then taught at Rutland School in Dublin, where she rose to the rank of principal. Her daughter Helen Magaw was a celebrated crystallographer.

Links: 1892 Vict C

Albert J. McConnell (1903-1993) was born on 19 Nov in Ballymena, Antrim, and was educated at TCD and at La Sapienza University in Rome. He spent his entire career at TCD, serving as provost, and wrote two books, one on Riemannian geometry and tensor calculus.

Links: Wikipedia TCD Ulster Biog IT Obit

John (Jack) Semple (1904-1985) was born 10 Jun in Belfast, and was educated at QUB and at Cambridge. He lectured at QUB and at King's College, London. He co-authored 3 books on algebraic geometry.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

Muriel Kennett (1913-2009) was born 9 Jun in Belfast. In 1914, her mother moved to Vancouver and soon remarried; henceforth Muriel was known by the last name Wales. She was educated at the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto, where she earned postgraduate degrees for research in algebra. She spent most of the 1940s working in atomic energy, in Toronto and Montreal.

Links: MA PhD

Richard Ingram (1916-1967) was born 27 Jul in Belfast, and was educated at UCD and Johns Hopkins. A priest, his interests included geophysics and algebra. In addition to teaching maths at UCD for two decades, he spent many years running the seismological observatory at Rathfarnam Castle. A founding member of the IMTA, he also co-edited Volume 3 of the complete papers of Hamilton.

Links: Obit Johns Hopkins

John Herivel (1918-2011) was born 29 Aug in Belfast. Upon graduation from Cambridge he was drafted to work at Bletchley Park. Following the war, he taught at QUB for thirty years, and later at Oxford, writing several biographical books along the way.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

Statistician Gordon Foster (1921-2010) was born 24 February in Belfast, and was educated at QUB and at Oxford. His career included stints at Bletchley Park, Manchester (alongside Alan Turing), and the London School of Economics, where he devised a 9-digit code upon which the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is based. He was an operations research, informatics and computing pioneer, and was the inaugural prof of statistics at TCD, where he supervised numerous PhDs. In later years, he worked to connect remote areas of the world to the internet.

Links: Wikipedia Obit

Barbara Yates (1919-1998) was born on 22 Jan in Dublin, and grew up in Belfast. Like her father and two brothers before her, she got a maths degree from TCD, having also been a Scholar there. She completed her PhD in differential equations in 1952, making her the first Irish woman graduate to receive a doctorate in pure maths. Her long academic career was mostly spent at Royal Holloway.

Links: Wikipedia Paper

Murray MacBeath (1923-2014) was born 30 Jun in Glasgow and brought up in Belfast. He was educated at QUB and workd at Bletchley before continuing his studies, first at Cambridge, and then at Princeton. His career was mostly spent at Dundee, Birmingham and the University of Pittsburgh. He worked on groups acting on Riemann surfaces, and supervised many PhDs.

Links: Wikipedia MacT Times Scotsman LMS

Mathematical physicist John Stewart Bell (1928-1990) was born on 28 Jul in Belfast. He was educated at QUB and Birmingham, and spent much of his career at CERN. He is known for Bell's Theorem which says that no physical theory of local hidden variable can reproduce all of the predictions in quntum mechanics.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

James Taylor was born 13 Dec in Carrickfergus, Antrim, and was educated at QUB and Cambridge. His career was spent at Birmingham, Westfield College, Liverpool, and the University of Virginia. His expertise includes Brownian motion, "small sets" and fractals. He has three books to his name, as well as seven joint publications with Erdős. His son Charles is also a mathematician.

Link: Bio

Theoretical physicist Coulter McDowell (1932-1993) was born 30 Jan in Belfast. He was educated at QUB and at Columbia University, and his career was spent at Royal Holloway with a mid-career stint at Durham. He supervised numerous theses and wrote books.

Link: RAS

Theoretical physicist Ron McCarroll was born in Ballymena, Antrim, and was educated at QUB. His career has been spent at QUB, CNRS, Bordeaux University, and Pierre & Marie Curie University.

Astronomer Derek McNally was born 28 Oct in Belfast, and was educated first at QUB. In 1960 he completed his PhD on "Problems of interstellar and intergalactic matter" at Royal Holloway with Bill McCrea. He spend four decades at the University of London where he served as director of the observatory, and then moved to the University of Hertfordshire. His publications include the book Positional Astronomy (Wiley, 1974).

Links: IAU Prabook

Declan McCartan was born Donegal (as a result of a wartime temporary family relocation) and grew up in Belfast. He was educated at QUB where he also spent his entire career, supervising several PhD theses in topology along the way.

Link: MGP MathSciNet

Ken Houston was born 13 Jan in Belfast, and was educated at QUB. His 1967 on "Variational Bounds in Scattering Theory" was done under Benno Moiseiwitsch (1927-2016). He lectured at Jordanstown for over three decades, where he aimed to encourage in mathematics undergrads the art of mathematical modelling and to adopt this as their professional "Way of Life," and he published a lot in this area. He edited the essential book Creators of Mathematics: The Irish Connection (UCD Press, 2000).

Link: UU

Mathematical physicist Denis Weaire was born 17 Oct in Dalhousie, India, and brought up in Belfast. He was educated at Cambridge and spent his career at Yale, Heriot-Watt, UCD and TCD. In 1993, with Robert Phelan, he came up with a counterexample to William Thompson's conjecture about the most economical way to partition space into cells of equal size with minimal surface area. The resulting structure was used in the design of the aquatic centre at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Links: Wikipedia AE

John Coulter McConnell was born in Ballycarrickmaddy, near Lisburn, Antrim. He was educated at QUB and Leeds, writing his 1965 doctoral thesis on "Universal Enveloping Algebras of Lie Algebras" with Alfred Goldie. His career was also spent at Leeds, where he supervised several theses and co-authored the book Noncommutative Noetherian Rings (Wiley, 1987).

Robin Harte was born on 5 May in Belfast, and was educated at TCD and Cambridge. His 1965 PhD on "Modules over a Banach algebra" was done under John H. Williamson. After five years at Swansea, he spent two decades at UCC. The last quarter century has seen him pursue life and research in an itinerant fashion, in various parts of the world. Along the way he has authored two books on functional analysis.

Links: Bio TCD

Brendan Goldsmith was born 22 Jan in Belfast, and was educated at QUB and Oxford. He started his career at Kevin Street, and in time became the first president of the new Dublin Institute of Technology. He is an algebraist by training, and has supervised several doctocal theses.

Link: DIT

Statistician Sally McClean was born 30 Apr in Belfast, and was educated at QUB and Cardiff. After getting her PhD at Coleraine, she joined the staff and has supervised about 40 PhDs there and at Jordanstown. She has co-authored an influential text on statistical techniques for manpower planning.

Links: Univ of Ulster

Astronomer Carl Murray was born in Belfast, and was educated at Queen Mary College, London, where he has spent most of his career. He studies the dynamics of planetary systems, and in particular the rings of Saturn. He co-authored the text Solar System Dynamics.

Links: Queen Mary Speaker

Aisling McCluskey was born in Belfast on the Ides of March, and was educated at QUB. She is a topologist and teaches at NUI Galway. She recently co-authored a book on undergraduate topology with Brian McMaster from QUB.

Links: NUIG Video

Applied mathematician Mark McCartney was born 17 Apr in Belfast and was educated at QUB. He teaches at the University of Ulster at Jordanstown, and his expertise includes vehicle dynamics and physics. He has co-authored several biographcal books on physicists and mathematicians.

Link: UUJ

Patricia Eaton (née Matthews) was born 13 Sep in Belfast, and was educated at QUB. Switching from topology to teacher education, she has spent her career at Stranmillis, where she has served as head of continuing education.

Links: S'millis LinkedIn

Mathematical physicist Joseph Everett (1831-1904) was born 11 Sep in Rushmere, Suffolk, England, and was educated at Glasgow College. For 30 years he taught at Queen's College, Belfast, and he authored several books on dynamics, light, and sound.

Link: Wikipedia

Alfred (A.C.) Dixon (1865-1936) was born 22 May in Yorkshire, and was educated at the Univ of London and at Cambridge. His career started at Queen's College, Galway, following which he spent three decades at Queen's College, Belfast. His area of research was differential equations. Upon retirement he became president of the London Mathematical Society.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor Obit Camb

Theoretical physicist Karl Emeléus (1901-1989) was born in London and was educated at Cambridge. After a few years at the Cavendish Lab, he worked at QUB for four decades, pursuing research in applied physics and electronics.

Links: BBC Bio

Samuel Verblunsky (1906-1996) was born 25 June in London, and was educated at Cambridge. After some years at Manchester, he moved to QUB, where he worked for over four decades, supervising numerous theses in analysis and applied mathematics.

Link: Wikipedia

Ralph Henstock (1923-2007) was born 2 Jun in Nottinghamshire, and was educated at Cambridge and Birkbeck College. He worked at QUB and at Coleraine, supervising several doctorates, as well as at Bristol and Lancaster. His legacy includes an alternative approach to integration, and three books on that topic.

Links: Wikipedia Obit 1 Obit 2 Obit 3

Theoretical physicist and applied mathematician Benjamin Moiseiwitsch (1927-2016) was born 7 Dec in London, and was educated at the University of London. He spent four decades on the staff at QUB, where be supervised numerous theses and wrote four books. He also served as dean.

Links: QUB Obit

Tony Wickstead was born 13 Dec in Plymouth, and was educated at Cambridge and the University of London. He recently retired after four decades on the staff at QUB, where he supervised numerous doctorates. His research concerns Banach lattices and linear operators on them.

Link: QUB

Martin Mathieu was born 11 May in Heidelberg, Germany, grew up in Bavaria, and was educated at Tübingen. He worked there and in Saarbrücken and Maynooth before settling at QUB. His research area is operator theory and operator algebras. He has published 6 books and supervised several doctorates.

Links: QUB Web

Ivan Todorov was born 14 Jul in Bulgaria and grew up in Greece. He was educated at the University of Sofia and the University of Athens, before settling at QUB. His interests are in operator algebras, functional analysis, abstract harmonic analysis, and quantum information theory, and he has supervised many postgraduate students.

Links: QUB Web

Armagh

James McMahon (1856-1922) was born 22 Apr in Armagh, and first pursued metaphysics and classical studies at TCD. He taught mathematics at Cornell for many decades, serving as chair too. He published extensively in applied maths, and authored three textbooks. He was a founding member of what became the American Mathematical Society, and is believed to be the first Irish person to supervise a doctoral thesis.

Links: Wikipedia Cornell

Mathematical physicist Thomas Preston (1860-1900) was born 23 May in Ballyhagan, Armagh, and was educated at TCD. He taught at UCD, and did research in electromagnetic and spectroscopic sciences. He is remembered for his work on the analysis of spectral lines, and for two physics textbooks.

Links: Wikipedia Ulster Bio RDS AAI link

Grace Faris (née Acheson, 1885-1973) was born 17 Dec in Portadown, Armagh, and was educated to Master's level in Belfast. For many years she taught English and classics as well as maths at Victoria College, rising to the rank of headmistress. Her older sister Molly had a shorter teaching career in Belfast, having done maths at Girton. Grace's son John Faris was a logician at QUB.

Link: Son's Obit

Richard Watson was born on 26 Jul in Portadown, Armagh, and was educated at Maynooth, Warwick and Swansea. He taught at Maynooth for 35 years--—earning his doctorate on along the way--—and also served as dean there. He has co-authored two books, Maynooth Mathematical Olympiad Manual and A Resource for Transition Year Mathematics Teachers.

Links: Maynooth

John Lennox was born 7 Nov in Armagh(?) and was educated at Cambridge. He taught for 3 decades at Cardiff and then moved to Oxford, where he teaches science and religion as well as mathematics. He has authored two books on mathematics and many more on science and religion.

Links: Wikipedia Oxford

Astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell (née Bell) was born 15 Jul in Lurgan, Armagh, and was educated at Glasgow and Cambridge. Her career has included stints at Southampton, University of London, the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, the Open University, Bath, and Oxford. She is best known for her co-discovery of pulsars.

Links: Wikipedia Enc Brit Web TCD

Carlow

Samuel Haughton (1821–1897) was born on 21 Dec in Carlow town. He studied maths at TCD, where he later taught for over 35 years, for much of that as professor of geology. His mathematical work was extensive, and he also qualified as a medical doctor. The 10 books he co-authored with TCD colleague Joseph Galbraith are credited with educating ”a generation of Irishmen in technical issues that would make them skilled and employable.”

Links: Wikipedia Enc Brit Hist of Irl

Theoretical physicist Michael McGettrick was born in Carlow town, and was educated at TCD and Notre Dame. He works at NUIG, where his current interests are quantum computing, computer algebra, and tropical geometry.

Link: NUIG

Cavan

Philosopher Philip McShane was born in Ballieborough, Cavan, and was educated at UCD and at Oxford. He taught at the Milltown Institute of Philosophy & Theology for 5 years and then at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for 2 decades. His work focussed on the interface between the natural sciences and the human sciences.

Link: Web

Brendan Browne was born in Cavan, and was educated at UCD and Leeds. A numerical analyst, most of his career was spent at Kevin St (later DIT).

John Cosgrave was born 5 Jan in Ballieborough, Cavan, and was educated at Royal Holloway College, at the University of London. The bulk of his teaching career was spent at Carysfort College and St. Patrick's College, Drumcondra. Since taking early retirement he's been an active researcher in number theory.

Links: Wikipedia Web

Mathematical educator Olivia Fitzmaurice (née Gill) was born on 19 Oct in Cavan and was educated at UL and Maynooth. Her 2006 PhD was done with John O'Donoghue. After some secondary teaching, she returned to UL. Her research areas include adult learners of mathematics, service mathematics, the Irish Mathematics Learning Support Network (IMLSN) and mathematics in initial teacher education.

Link: UL

Clare

Matthew O'Brien (1814-1855) was born in Ennis, Clare, and was educated at TCD (BA 1834) and Cambridge (BA 1838, 3rd wrangler, MA 1841). He taught at King's College, London, and at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He is credited with anticipating by several decades many of the results of classic vector analysis, and he applied them to the mechanics of the earth's motion. Among the books he published were several maths textbooks.

Links: IMS DNB Bio Hist Math

Paddy Kennedy (1929-1966) was born on 20 Jul in Clarecastle, Clare, and was educated at UCC and the University of Exeter. After a decade teaching at UCC during which he published extensively in analysis, he became the first professor of mathematics at the new University of York. Sadly, he died a few years later.

Links: MacTutor Link 1 Link 2

Michael Clancy was born 16 Mar in Kilmihil, Clare, and educated at UCG and Notre Dame. His career has been at UCG and DCU. His research interests include topological groups.

Link: DCU

John E. McCarthy was born on 20 Jan in Parteen, Clare, near Limerick, and was educated at TCD and Berkeley. Most of his career has been spent at Washington University at St. Louis, where he has supervised many PhDs. He is an analyst with interests in operator theory and complex variables, and has written three books.

Links: Washington U Interview Interview 2

Martin Meere was born in London and raised near Ennis, Clare. He was educated at UCG, UCD and the University of Nottingham, and now teaches at NUIG. An applied mathematician, his current interests include the mathematical modelling of drug delivery.

Links: NUIG

Cork

Mathematical physicist John Stevelly (1795-1868) was born 23 Jun in Cork and educated at TCD. His career was spent at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and at QUB.

Link: Bio

Robert Murphy (1806-1843) was born (probably in Dec) in Mallow, Cork. After publishing a spectacular maths pamphlet at the age of 18, despite having no early formal education, he graduated from Cambridge (BA 1829, 3rd wrangler, MA 1832). His brief career was mostly spent at Cambridge and at the University of London. He worked in algebraic equations, integral equations (with applications to electrostatics, gravity and heat), and operator calculus, and wrote 2 books.

Links: Wiki MAA Letter & Bio

John Mulcahy (1810?-1853) was from Cork city. He was educated at TCD, which was unusual for a Catholic at that time. He was the first professor of mathematics to teach at the new Queen's College, Galway, where he also served as dean. His well-regarded Principles of Modern Geometry text appeared the year before his early death.

Link: IMS

Agnes Clerke (1842-1907) was born 10 Feb in Skibbereen, Cork. She was educated privately, studying mathematics, physics and astronomy at the third level in Dublin, and later in Italy. Settling in London, she published extensively, wrote numerous popular and well regarded books on the history of astronomy, and contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica on both astronomy and mathematics.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

Alicia Stott (née Boole, 1860–1940) was born 8 Jun in Cork, a daughter of George & Mary Boole, and was educated in London. Though she never attended university, she was a pioneer in the visualisation of 4-dimensional shapes. She published several papers, and coined the term polytope for higher dimensional analogues of polyhedra.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

Statistician John Hooper (1878-1929) was born 26 Jan in Cork city. He was educated at UCD, and spent his whole career in the civil service. He became the country's first Director of Statistics in the new state's Department of Industry and Commerce. The Central Statistics Office now awards a medal annually in his honour.

Links: Wikipedia CSO Medal

Eoghan McKenna (1891-1967) was born on 13 Dec in Millstreet, Cork. After earning his BSc and MSc from UCC, he taught in schools in Ireland and Glasgow and at the Municipal College of Technology (Belfast) before moving to UCG, where he lectured on mathematical physics through Irish for over three decades. Actress Siobhan McKenna, who briefly studied maths at UCG, was his daughter.

Link: Bio

T.S. (Stan) Broderick (1893-1962) was born 22 May in Youghal, Cork, and was educated at UCC. A probabilist, his career was spent at TCD, where he rose to the rank of vice-provost. Poet Edna Longley is his daughter.

Link: TCD UCC

Statistician Donal McCarthy (1908-1980) was born 4 Jun in Midleton, Cork. He was educated at UCC, and studied at University College London. The latter led to a PhD, awarded by UCC, where he then taught for a decade. He served as director of the Central Statistics Office, before returning to UCC as president of the college.

Links: Wikipedia

Statistician Tadhg Carey (1919-1995) was born near Kinsale and grew up in Castlehaven, Cork. He was educated at UCC and at the University of London. He spent 4 decades at UCC, where he was instrumental in the setting up of the department of statistics in 1955. He also served as college registrar and president.

Link: UCC

Siobhan Vernon (née O'Shea, 1932-2002) was born on 24 Feb in Macroom, Cork, and was educated at UCC, where she taught for over 30 years. Her 1964 PhD in mathematical analysis, awarded for previously published work, is believed to be the first doctorate in pure mathematics earned by a woman in Ireland.

Links: MacTutor Obit

Mathematical physicist Jim Flavin (1936-2012) was born 3 Dec in Cork, and was educated at UCC and at the University of Durham at Newcastle. He served on the staff at UCG for 40 years, teaching many courses in Irish. His field of research was initially continuum mechanics, especially classical elasticity. Later, he published the book Quantitative Estimates for Partial Diffential Equations: An Introduction.

Links: IMSl IMS obit

Trevor West (1938-2012) was born 8 May in Midleton, Cork. He was educated at TCD and Cambridge, earning his 1963 PhD on "Riesz and Fredholm theory in Banach algebras" under Frank Smithies. He spent most of his career at TCD, where he worked in functional analysis. He served several terms on Seanad Éireann and wrote numerous books, both on mathematics and other subjects.

Links: Wikipedia LMS Obit RIA

Applied mathematician Mattie McCarthy (1938-2017) was born on 19 Nov in Cork city, and was educated at UCC and Nottingham. His four decade career was based at UCG, where he also served as dean, registrar, and deputy president. His research interests included continuum mechanics, dielecrtics, and wave propogation.

Link: Obit

Finbarr Holland was born 12 May in Cork city, and was educated at UCC and at Cardiff, getting his 1964 PhD on "Contributions to Harmonic Analysis" under Lionel Cooper. A classical analyst, his career has been spent at UCC, where he has supervised several theses. He was the founding president of the Irish Mathematical Society in 1977, and led the first Irish team to compete at an International Mathematics Olympiad in 1988. He is still an active in the Cork Mathematical Enrichment Programme for secondary school students, which he initiated thirty years ago.

Link: UCC

Brian Twomey was born in Ballincollig, Cork, and was educated at UCC, and at Royal Holloway and Imperial Colleges. His career was spent at UCC, where he supervised several theses. His area of research is complex function theory.

Link: UCC

Sean Dineen was born 12 Feb in Clonakilty, Cork, and was educated at UCC and the University of Maryland College Park (and on the beaches of Brazil, rumour has it). His 1969 PhD on "Holomorphy Types on a Banach Space" was done under Leo Nachbin. His career was spent at UCD, where he supervised numerous doctoral theses and wrote (or edited) 10 books on analysis, calculus, and mathematical finance.

Links: UCD IMS

Statistician Jerome Sheahan was born 8 Jan in Boherbue, Cork, and educated at UCC, Carlton University and the University of Calgary. After a decade plus at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, he settled at UCG/NUIG, where he often serves as consultant to numerous statistical clients. He is the recipient of several teaching awards.

Link: NUIG

Statistician Don Barry was born in Mallow, Cork, and was educated at UCC and Yale. After a decade plus on the staff back at UCC he moved to the University of Limerick, where he has served as registrar and president. He has supervised numerous doctorates.

Link: UL

Donal O'Regan was born in Cork and educated at UCC and Oregon State University. After a spell at Maynooth, he joined the staff at UCG/NUIG, where he works on differential equations and fixed point theory. He has over 1000 papers and 25 books to his name.

Links: NUIG NUIG 2

Stephen Buckley was born 8 Feb in Cork, and was educated at UCC and the University of Chicago. He has long been on the staff at Maynooth, where his research interests are broad, including algebra, metric geometry and geometric analysis.

Link: Maynooth

Terry Maguire was born 4 Feb in Passage West, Cork, and studied science at UCC. After years of working in higher education in Scotland she did her doctorate in mathematical education at the University of Limerick. She founded Maths Eyes and now works for the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching & Learning in Higher Education.

Links: T&L Maths Eyes

Tom Carroll was born 21 Sep in Kildorrery, Cork, and was educated at UCC and the Open University (Milton Keynes). His career has been spent at UCC. His research interests include complex analysis, potential theory, Brownian motion, and financial mathematics. He plays a lead role in the national TEAME maths e-assessment project.

Links: UCC TEAME

Ann O'Shea was born in Cork city, and educated at UCC and Notre Dame. Her career has been spent at Maynooth, she she has supervised several PhD students. Her research interests range from several complex variables to mathematics education.

Links: Maynooth Maths Edu

Theorerical physicist Sinéad Ryan was born in Millstreet, Cork, and was educated at UCC and the University of Edinburgh. After a few years at the Fermi Lab, she joined the staff at TCD, where she has served as head of the school of maths. Her interests lie in high energy particle physics, in particular, numerical simulation of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD).

Link: TCD

Career in Cork

Mathematician and logician George Boole (1815-1864) was born 2 Nov in Lincoln. Despite being largely self taught, in 1849 he secured a job as Professor of mathematics at Queen’s College, Cork. His legacy includes Boolean algebra, which laid the foundations of the information age. His daughter Alicia also made contributions to mathematics.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor 200th

Alexei Pokrovskii (1948-2010) was born 2 Jun in Voronezh, Russia, and was educated at Voronezh State University and the Institute for Control Problems, Moscow. He worked in Moscow and Australia before settling at UCC in 1997, where he soon became department head. His research was broad, and he was a pioneer in the mathematical theory of systems with hysteresis.

Links: IMS Irish Times

Anca Mustata was born in 29 Sep in Romania, and was educated at Bucharest and at the Univ of Utah. She is an algebraic geometer working at UCC, and has recently supervised two PhD students there. She is also active in Maths Circles.

Links: UCC Maths Circles

Donegal

John Kells Ingram (1823-1907) was born on 7 Jul in Templecarne, Pettigo, Donegal, and was brought up there and in Newry. He was educated at TCD, where he excelled in maths, both as a student and early in his long career there. He has been co-credited with introducing the geometric concept of inversion in a circle. He was professor of oratory and Greek, and rose to the rank of vice provost. He is remembered today as an economist and as a poet; indeed he penned "The Memory of the Dead" (aka "Who Fears to Speak of '98"). Also, as the librarian at TCD, it was he who first had the Book of Kells put on public display.

Links: Wikipedia DUB

Agnes Geraldine Scott (1879-1954?) was born 12 Jan in Moville, Inishowen, Donegal, and attended Alexandra College in Dublin. She earned her BA in 1902 from the Royal University of Ireland, a few years before TCD awarded women degrees. Her career included teaching in Exeter and Newcastle in England.

Link: Woman's World

Margaret Funston (1893 to at least 1938) was born 7 Aug in Tullycarn, near Pettigo, Donegal, and got her degree from TCD where she was a Scholar in mathematics. She is believed to have taught for many years.

Frank Marshall Smith (1912-1987) was born 31 Dec in Carndonagh, Inishowen, Donegal. (His mother Dorothy Carlton Harden had received an RUI maths degree in 1897.) He graduated from TCD, where he was a Scholar in mathematics. He taught at Campbell College in Belfast, as well as at some schools in England, but the bulk of his career was spent in the civil service in Malaya.

Link: Malaya

Kay McNulty (1921-2006) was officially born on 12 Feb, in Creeslough, Donegal, but family circumstances led to her growing up in Philadelphia. She earned a maths degree there in 1942 and went on to become a pioneering computer programmer on the ENIAC. History remembers Kay under her later married names, as Mauchly and/or Antonelli.

Links: Wikipedia MacT

Declan McCartan was born in Ballyshannon, Donegal (as a result of a temporary wartime family relocation) and grew up in Belfast. He was educated at QUB where he also spent his entire career, superivising several PhD theses in topology along the way.

Link: MGP

Fintan Gallagher was born 17 Feb in Downings, Donegal, and was educated at UCG. Thanks to an exchange studentship program, he pursued postgraduate study in maths at the University of Geneva, but he soon switched to computers. Most of his career was spent in computer planning and design with IBM in Nice, France. His daughters Maureen (Clerc) and Isabelle (Mazelet) both ended up in maths-related research. Isabelle is professor in Paris-Diderot University, and Maureen is into brain research at INRIA in Sophia-Antipolis, near Nice.

Brendan Quigley was born in Lifford, Donegal, and mostly grew up in Strabane, Tyrone. He was educated at QUB and at Indiana University at Bloomington. An algebraic topologist by training, he taught at UCD for four decades, where he was an early proponent of the use of LaTeX software.

Link: MGP

Mathematical physicist Johnny Gallagher was born in Dungloe, Donegal, and received all of his education at UCG. Trained in elasticity, for over 30 years he worked at Dundalk IT.

Link: MGP

Joe Varilly was born 20 Feb in Carrigans, east of Letterkenny, in Donegal, and grew up in Dungloe. He was educated at UCD and at the University of Rochester. He has spent his career at the University of Costa Rica, and has written two books on noncommutative geometry. His son Tony Várilly-Alvarado is also a mathematician.

Links: MGP MathSciNet Costa Rica Costa Rica 2

Jimmy McLaughlin was born 26 Oct in Glentogher, Inishowen, Donegal, and first studied maths at Coleraine. After a long gap, he pursued postgraduate work at UCD and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Most of his subsequent career has been spent at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. His research interests include integer partitions, continued fractions, and the mathematics of Ramanujan. He has forthcoming book entitled "Topics and Methods in q-Series."

Links: MGP MathSciNet West Chester

Chris Boyd was born in Bunbeg, Donegal, and was educated at TCD and UCD. He now teaches at UCD, and his research interests include functional analysis, infinite dimensional holomorphy, and the geometry of Banach spaces.

Links: MGP MathSciNet UCD

Ronan Flatley was born in Dublin and brought up in Sligo town and Letterkenny, Donegal. He was educated entirely at UCD—first in engineering—earning his 2012 PhD on "Symbol Algebras, Involutions and Trace Forms" with Thomas Unger & Dave Lewis. He now teaches at Mary Immaculate College, and his interests include central simple algebras with involution and the algebraic theory of quadratic forms.

Link: MIC

Paddy Hannigan was born in Letterkenny, Donegal, and was educated at DCU and at UU Jordanstown. A probabilist by training, his career has been spent at the Letterkenny Institute of Technology.

Link: MGP

John Cyril Murray was born in Clonmel, then lived in Wexford before his family settled down in Letterkenny, Donegal. He was educated first at UCD, where he won an NUI Travelling Studentship Prize, and then at the University Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. An algebraist, his career has been spent at Maynooth.

Links: MGP MR Maynooth

Maria Meehan was born in Donegal town. She was educated at UCG, where she won an NUI Travelling Studentship Prize, and her career has been at UCD. Her interests were originally in the existence of solutions of nonlinear integral and integrodifferential equations, and she co-edited two books on those topics. Now she researches how students learn advanced mathematics at university level.

Links: MGP MR UCD

Statistician Helen Purtill (née Mac Mullen) was born on 26 May in Killybegs, Donegal, and was educated at DCU and at Sheffield Hallam. She has long been based at the University of Limerick, where she is a member of the Health Research Institute and is actively involved in interdisciplinary research with assorted collaborators.

Links: MGP UL

Theoretical physicist Francis Dolan (1977-2011) was born 10 May in Sligo, and grew up in Killygordon, Donegal. He was educated at UCG and Cambridge. His short career was very productive. His interests included superconformal characters and partition functions.

Links: MGP MathSciNet Surrey Inspire Dedication

Martin Kerin was born in Buncrana, Donegal, and was educated at Maynooth and at the University of Pennsylvania. A differential geometer by training, he works at the University of Münster. His interests include positive and non-negative sectional curvature, and the geometry and topology of homogeneous spaces and biquotients.

Link: MGP MathSciNet Münster

John Harvey was born in Carndonagh, Inishowen, Donegal, and was educated at UCD and at the University of Notre Dame. A differential geometer by training, he works at the University of Münster. His research interests lie in Alexandrov geometry, Riemannian geometry and transformation groups.

Links: MGP MathSciNet

Mathematician and thermodynamics pioneer James Thomson (1786-1849) was born 13 Nov in Annaghdown near Ballynahinch, Down. He was educated at the University of Glasgow (MA 1812) and was professor there following two decades at the Belfast Academical Institution. His son William (later known as Lord Kelvin) grew up in Belfast and Glasgow and gained fame as a brilliant scientist, mathematician, and engineer.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

Cornelius Denvir (1791-1866) was born 13 Aug in Ballywalter, Down, and was educated at Maynooth. Upon ordination, he succeeded Abbé Darré on the staff there, teaching theology and maths. Later, he taught classics and maths at the New Down and Connor Diocesan College, and became Lord Bishop of Down and Connor.

Link: Wikipedia CH

William McFadden Orr (1866-1934) was born on 2 May in Comber, Down, and was educated at QUB and Cambridge. He taught at the Royal College of Science for Ireland and then at UCD. He is remembered for the Orr-Sommerfield equation in fluid dynamics.

Links: Wikipedia Nature Royal Soc

Jack Todd (1911-2007) was born 16 May in Carnacally, Down, and educated at QUB and Cambridge. He worked at QUB and King's College, London, and later at the National Bureau of Standards and Caltech in the USA. He was an early proponent of using computers to do numerical mathematics. His efforts in the late 1940s helped to ensure the preservation of the Oberwolfach Mathematical Research Institute in Germany.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor IMS

Brian McMaster was born 12 Jan in Bangor, Down, and was educated at QUB, where he taught and did research in topology for four decades. He supervised numerous doctoral students, and co-authored a book on undergraduate topology with one of those, Aisling McCluskey of NUIG.

Link: Web

Raymond Flood was born 1 Dec in London and raised in Downpatrick, Down. He was educated at QUB, Oxford and UCD. He has taught at Kevin Street, DCU, Oxford and Gresham College. Trained as a probabilist, he has great expertise in history and biography of mathematical science, and has authored or edited 9 books on those topics.

Links: Wikipedia Gresham

Peter McPolin was born 7 Dec in Down, and was educated at QUB. He has long worked at St Mary's College, Belfast, where he contributes to academic courses in all four years of the B.Ed. Mathematics programme.

Links: St Mary's LinkedIn

William Molyneux (1656-1698) was born 17 Apr in Dublin, and was educated at TCD. He abandoned a career in law and turned to mathematical and scientific endeavours. His role in the 1684 founding of the Dublin Philosophical Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, Mathematics and Mechanics is considered to have been very influential.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor Ask

Dionysius Lardner (1793-1859) was born 3 Apr in Dublin. He was educated at TCD and worked there as a chaplain while publishing mathematical articles. For a few years he worked at the University of London as professor of physics and astronomy. He is best remembered for the mammoth Cabinet Cyclopædia, a series of over 100 volumes, which he edited.

Links: Wikipedia ricorso

William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865) was born 4 Aug in Dublin, and is Ireland’s most renowned mathematician and mathematical physicist. He was educated and spent most of his career at TCD. His extensive legacy includes innovations in algebra, mechanics and optics. He invented quaternions, a non-commutative algebraic system.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

John Graves (1806-1870, brother of Charles) was born 4 Dec in Dublin. He studied science and classics at TCD, as a classmate and friend of Hamilton, and then pursued law in London. Throughout, he maintained a parallel career as a mathematician and avid collector of maths books and pamphlets. One of his notable discoveries, from late 1843, was octonions, an extension of Hamilton’s quaternions.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

Charles Graves (1812-1899, brother of John) was born 6 Nov (or Dec?) in Dublin. He was educated at TCD and taught mathematics there for several decades before becoming Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert and Aghadoe for the second half of his long career. He was also an expert in Ogham inscriptions and Brehon laws.

Links: Wikipedia Obit

George Salmon (1819-1904) was born 25 Sep in Dublin, and grew up in Cork. He studied at TCD where he spent his career, also serving as provost. He wrote numerous popular and influential textbooks on higher level algebra and geometry, some of which appeared in French, German and Italian translation.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor IMS

George Allman (1924-1904) was born 28 Sep in Dublin, and was educated at TCD. He taught at Queen's College, Galway, for 40 years, publishing the well-regarded book Greek Geometry from Thales to Euclid. He made numerous contributions to the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

Henry Smith (1826-1883) was born 2 Nov in Dublin, and was brought up in England, being educated at both the Sorbonne and Oxford. His career was spent at Oxford, but he also did administrative work in London. He's best remembered for results in number theory, such as the fact that each integer is a sum of five squares, and for the Smith normal form of a matrix. He also worked in integration theory.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor Baylor

Astronomer and mathematical physicist Robert Stawell Ball (1840-1913) was born 1 Jul in Dublin, and was educated at TCD. Ball worked at Birr, TCD and Dunsink, as he was Royal Astronomer of Ireland. In mechanics, he invented the screw theory, and he authored many books.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

Writer Bram Stoker (1847-1912) was born 8 Nov in Dublin. He earned a BA in mathematics from TCD before working a decade in the civil service and then pursuing a long career in London theatre management. His 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula made him world famous.

Links: Wikipedia Enc Brit

Sophie Bryant (née Willock, 1850-1922), was born 15 Feb in Dublin. She earned degrees from the University of London in both mental and moral philosophy and maths. She taught at several schools and wrote many books on diverse topics. She was the first woman to have a paper published in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor IT

Mathematical physicist George FitzGerald (1851-1901) was born 3 Aug in Dublin, and he was educated at TCD, where he also spent his career. He was a pioneer in electromagnetic theory, and his name lives on today in the Lorentz–FitzGerald contraction.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

Physicist Edith Stoney (1869-1938) was born 6 Jan in Dublin, daughter to George Stoney who coined the term "electron." She aced her maths studies at Newnham College at Cambridge, although they didn't allow women to graduate; TCD later awarded her degrees. She had a remarkable career in physics and medical physics.

Links: Wikipidia ScienceGrrl RDS

Statistician Roy Geary (1896-1983) was born 11 Apr in Dublin. After study at UCD and the Sorbonne, he had a long career in the Department of Industry and Commerce, before leading both the Central Statistics Office and the Economic and Social Research Institute. His name lives on in the Stone–Geary utility function, the Geary–Khamis dollar, and elsewhere.

Links: Wikipedia MacT RDS IMS SSISI Podcast

Mathematical physicist John Lighton Synge (1897-1995) was born on 23 Mar in Dublin. Educated at TCD, he worked there and at the University of Toronto, as well as in the USA, and then at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. He supervised many theses and wrote over a dozen books. He is credited with the introduction of a new geometrical approach to the special and general theories of relativity. His daughter Cathleen Morawetz (1923-2017) had a successful mathematical career at the Courant Institute in the USA.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

Mathematician and astronomer Bill McCrea (1904-1999) was born on 13 Dec in Dublin, and was educated at Cambridge. His career, which included a stint at QUB, was mostly spent at Royal Holloway College. He discovered that the sun is largely made of hydrogen and helium.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

Victor Meally (1911-1986) was born 26 Jun in Dublin. He studied maths and philosophy at TCD, where he was also an avid chess player. He became an accountant, but also maintained correspondence with a great many mathematicians, including Richard Guy, John H. Conway, Sol Golomb, and Donald Coxeter, posing numerous problems in recreational mathematics and number theory. He edited an Encyclopedia Of Ireland (Figgis, 1968).

Links: Web Calgary

Theoretical physicist James R. McConnell (1915-1999) was born 25 Feb in Dublin, and was educated at UCD and in Rome, where he was ordained as a priest and earned his doctorate from La Sapienza University. His career started at the newly founded Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, but was mostly spent at St Patrick's College, Maynooth, where he also served as registrar.

Links: Wikipedia Obit IT RDS

Harry Sandham (1917-1963) was born in Dublin, and grew up there and in Sligo. He was educated at TCD, and following a decade teaching there he worked with John L. Synge at DIAS, under whom he completed his PhD. He then moved to English Electric Labs (Staffordshire), but died relatively young. He is best remembered as a problem setter and solver.

Cathleen Morawetz (née Synge, 1923-2017) was born 5 May in Toronto, and split her early years between there and Dublin when her father John Lighton Synge was on the staff at TCD. She was educated at the University of Toronto, MIT and NYU. Her career was spent at the Courant Institute, researching nonlinear PDEs, and she served as President of the American Mathematical Society.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor Simons AMS

Maurice Kennedy (1924-1994) was born 17 Dec in Dublin, and like his father Harry before him, he studied mathematical science at UCD. Following postgrduate work at Caltech, he spent his career at UCD, where he also served as registrar. His research interests included analysis, functional analysis, and point set topology.

Link: IMS

Cormac Smith (1926-2009) was born 29 Apr and was educated entirely at UCD. His PhD on "Generalized Quaternion Algebra of Hamilton" was one of the very first maths doctorates awarded in Ireland. The bulk of his career was spent in Canada, much of it at the University of Windsor, where he supervised several theses in applied maths.

Link: Obit

Brian Murdoch was born in Dublin. He was educated at TCD and at Princeton. A probabilist by training, his career was largely spent at TCD.

Links: MGP Irish Times

Mathematical physicist Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh (1933-2000) was born 11 Mar in Dublin. Educated at UCD and the University of Zürich, he earned his doctorate in 1960 on "Non Local Field Theories" with Walter Heitler, who had spent the 1940s at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. After some years at the the University of Syracuse, he himself worked for over three decades at DIAS, supervising many postgraduate students and writing five books. He is best known for several ground-breaking results in the application of group theory to the physics of elementary particles, notably his "no-go theorem."

Links: Wikipedia DIAS

Theoretical physicist Allan Solomon (1936-2013) was born 11 Dec in Glasgow and brought up in Belfast and Dublin. He was educated at TCD, Cambridge and the Sorbonne. In addition to stints at DIAS, NASA, Tel Aviv University, and the Sorbonne, he spent three decades with the Open University, making over 100 broadcasts for the BBC. He also wrote several books.

Links: IOP Tribute DIAS

Mathematical physicist David Spearman was born 25 Mar in Dublin, and was educated at TCD and Cambridge. The bulk of his career was spent on the staff at TCD, where he supervised three doctoral theses and rose to the rank of vice-provost and pro-chancellor.

Link: TCD

Physicist Paddy Dolan was born 18 Feb in Dublin, and was educated first at UCD, where he earned an NUI Travelling Studentship Prize. His 1964 PhD on "Problems in relativistic and steady-state cosmology" was done at Royal Holloway with Bill McCrea. He spent his career at Imperial College, where he supervised many doctorates.

John Miller was born 11 Aug in Dublin. At TCD, he studied modern languages before switching to maths. His 1965 from MIT on "An Improvement to the Kreiss Matrix Theorem" was done with Gil Strang. He spent three decades of his career at TCD, working on the numerical analysis of singularly perturbed differential equations, where he supervised over a dozen doctorates. His has written or edited over 30 books, and his current interests include the application of maths to renewable energy.

Links: TCD INCA

Tony Hollingsworth (1943-2007) was born 6 Jul in Crumlin, Dublin, and came first in the country in his Leaving Cert. He joined the Met service, who allowed him time off to earn degrees from UCC, and he completed his education at MIT. He had a distinguished 35-year career in the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting.

Links: IT R Met Soc

Ross Geoghegan was born 2 Jul in Dublin, and was educated at UCD and Cornell. He has taught at SUNY Binghamton in upstate New York for four decades, where he has supervised many doctoral theses and published two books. His interests lie in topology, geometric group theory, fixed point theory, and dynamics.

Links: SUNY Conf

Nóra Ní Chuív (granddaughter of Éamon de Valera) was born 2 Mar in Dublin, and was educated at UCD and the University of Washington. Her whole career was spent at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, where she authored Differential Geometry for Surveying Engineers and co-authored Partial Differential Equations and Complex Variables for Surveying Engineers. She also published in probability and software reliability testing.

Link: Web

Statistician Iognáid (Iggy) Ó Muircheartaigh was born 5 Mar in Dublin, and was educated at UCD and Glasgow. He spent four decades at UCG/NUIG, culminating in a term as the university's president. He's now active in research on the application of statistics to human rights, economics, and medicine.

Links: Wikipedia UCG

Statistician Colm Ó Muircheartaigh was born 16 Jan in Dublin, and was educated at UCD and the London School of Economics. He spent over 25 years at LSE before moving to the Chicago Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. He is an expert on survey sampling.

Links: Chicago Chicago 2

Donal O'Donovan was born in Dublin, and was educated at UCD and Berkeley. Most of his career has been spent on the staff at TCD, where he also served as department head. He's an analyst, whose interests lie in operator theory and operator alegbras.

Link: TCD

Tony O'Farrell was born 28 May in Dublin, and was educated at UCD and Brown. He spent over 35 years teaching at Maynooth, where he also helped to set up the department of computer science. His books (and publishing house, Logic Press) reflect his diverse mathematical interests. On 16 Oct 1990, he organised the first Hamilton Walk to Broom Bridge, in Dublin.

Links: Maynooth Logic Press Hamilton Walk

Joe McKenna (1948-2021) was born 5 Aug in Dublin, and was educated at UCD and at the University of Michigan. He spent 30 thirty years at the University of Connecticut, studying nonlinear partial differential equations, especially those relating to periodic flexing in large flexible structures such as bridges and ships. He supervised many PhDs students, most of them women.

Links: U Conn

David Callan was born on 27 Dec in Dublin, and was educated at UCD and Notre Dame. His career has been spent at Lafayette College, the Univ of Bridgeport, and the Univ of Wisconsin at Madison. His interests include combinatorics and statistics.

Link: UWM

Gerry Murphy (1948-2006) was born 12 Nov in Dublin. Growing up in Drimnagh, he left school at 14, yet eventually earned degrees from TCD and Cambridge. He then taught at TCD, and later at UCC, where he was head of department. He authored two books on functional analysis.

Links: Wikipedia IMS obit

Meteorologist Peter Lynch was born 19 Jun in Dublin, and was educated at UCD. After a career with the Irish Met Service, he returned to UCD to teach and supervise research on numerical weather prediction. In the Irish Times, and in his blog That's Maths, he writes about mathematics for the general public.

Links: UCD That's Maths

Astrophysicist Luke Drury was born 22 Jun in Dublin, and was educated at TCD and at Cambridge. After several years at the Max-Planck Institute in Heidelberg, he has spent the last three decades at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Study.

Links: DIAS RIA

Richard M. Timoney was born 17 Jul in Dublin, and is son of Prof J. R. (Dick) Timoney. He was educated at UCD and at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His career has been spent at TCD, where he has supervised numerous theses. His research interests include several complex variables and functional analysis.

Links: TCD

Theoretical physicist Tom Sherry was born 25 Dec in Dublin, and was educated at UCD. Most of his career has been spent at UCG/NUIG, where he has served as dean.

Link: NUIG

Statistician Adrian Raftery was born 22 Jul in Dublin, and was educated at TCD and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. Most of his career has been spent at the University of Washington in Seattle. He has supervised 30 PhDs, and was identified as the world's most cited researcher in mathematics for the period 1995-2005.

Links: Wikipedia UW

Theoretical physicist Michael P. Tuite was born 17 Mar in Dublin, and was educated at UCD and Cambridge. Most of his career has been spent at NUIG. His research interests include monstrous moonshine, about which he has co-authored a book, and vertex algebras.

Link: NUIG

Journalist Mary Mulvihill (1959-2015) was born 1 Sep in London, and brought up in Dublin. She studied genetics and statistics at TCD. Her articles, broadcasts, and books championed forgotten Irish STEM pioneers, including many women. Her self-guided "Dublin by Numbers" mathematics trail is aimed at school children, and is freely downloadable today.

Links: Wikipedia Ingenious Ireland

Paul (Niall) Feehan was born 31 Mar in Dublin, where he studied electrical engineering at UCD. He got his mathematical education later at the University of Southern California and Columbia University. Most of his career has been at Rutgers, where his research includes the topology of 4-dimensional manifolds, and differential geometry.

Link: Rutgers

Michael Mackey was born 12 Aug in Dublin, and was educated at UCD, where he now works. His research is in Jordan structures, and he recently served as president of the Irish Mathematical Society.

Link: UCD IMS

Gary McGuire was born in Dublin, and was educated at UCD and Caltech. He worked at the University of Virginia before returning to UCD. His interests include number theory, codes and cryptography. His team at the Irish Centre for High-End Computing showed that a 16-clue Sudoku puzzle does not exist.

Links: UCD Sudoku

Mathematics education expert Thérèse Dooley was born on 19 Feb in Dublin, and was educated at UCD, DCU and Cambridge. She teaches at St. Patrick's Drumcondra, and is very active in the Mathematics Education Ireland conferences. In 2012, she co-edited the book Re-imagining Initial Teacher Education: Perspectives on Transformation.

Links: SPD MEI

Brendan Guilfoyle was born 7 Dec in Dublin. He was educated at TCD and at the University of Texas at Austin, and has long worked at IT Tralee. He helped to prove the Caratheodory Conjecture in classical surface theory, which had been unresolved for 80 years.

Link: Web

Eabhnat Ní Fhloinn was born 14 Oct in Dublin, and was educated at TCD. Soon after completing her doctoral studies in crytptography, she joined the staff at DCU, where she teaches maths and runs the innovative Maths Learning Centre.

Link: DCU

Adam Fuller was born in Dublin, and educated at TCD, Cambridge and Waterloo. His research is in operator algebras and multivariate operator theory. His career so far has been spent at the University of Lincoln (Nebraska), California State University (Los Angeles) and Ohio University (Athens).

Link: MGP Web

Statistician William Gosset (1876-1937) was born 13 Jun in Canterbury, England, and was educated at Oxford. For 35 years he worked at the Guinness brewery in Dublin. He is best remembered for the so-called Student's t-distribution.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

Theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) was born 12 Aug in Vienna, and was educated there. In 1940, at the invitation of Éamon de Valera, he helped to set up the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, where he worked until 1957. He is best remembered for his foundational work in quantum mechanics.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor Nobel Ency Brit

Mathematical physicist Cornelius Lanczos (1893-1974) was born 2 Feb in Budapest, and was educated at the Universities of Budapest and Szeged. After 30 years in academia in Germany and the USA, he worked at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies from 1952 to 1968, giving many public lectures and writing several books aimed at the broad public.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor Film 1 Film 2

Mathematical physicist and chemist Walter Heitler (1904-1981) was born 2 Jan in Karlsruhe, Germany. He was educated there and in Berlin and Munich. He spent the 1940s at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, and wrote several popular books on quantum physics.

Link: Wikipedia

Electrical engineer and mathematical physicist Brendan Scaife was born 19 May in London, and was educated at Queen Mary College there. Since the 1950s, he's been Dublin based, first at DIAS and Kevin St, but mostly at TCD. He has done pioneering work on the theory of dielectrics, has supervised dozens or theses, and written six books.

Links: Wikipedia RDS

Mathematical physicist John T. Lewis (1932-2004) was born 15 Apr in Swansea. He was educated at QUB, taught at Oxford, and for 25 years he was director of the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. His areas of interest included quantum measurement, Bose–Einstein condensation and large deviations theory, and he supervised about 30 doctoral theses.

Links: Wikipedia IMS DIAS

Theoretical physicist Petros Florides was born 16 Feb in Lapithos, Cyprus, and was educated at the University of London. His 1960 PhD on "Problems in Relativity Theory and Relativistic Cosmology" from Royal Holloway was supervised by Bill McCrea. After a two-year postdoc with John Synge at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, he settled at TCD, where he spent over four decades on the staff, rising to the rank of pro-chancellor.

Links: Wikipedia Snipview

Theoretical physicist Sara McMurry was born 30 Jul in Bedford, and was educated at Bedford College and Oxford. She worked at TCD for four decades, writing a book on quantum mechanics and another entitled ``Mathematics As a Language - Understanding and Using Maths.'' She has also brought maths to young children in India.

Links: TCD Book India

Mathematics education expert Elizabeth Oldham was born 11 Feb in Sheffield, of Irish parents. She was educated at TCD, where she has spent most of her career in the School of Education. She has been involved in several studies by the Educational Research Centre. Her work relates to mathematics curriculum and to teaching and learning mathematics.

Link: TCD

Dave Lewis was born 21 Feb in the Isle of Man, and was educated at Liverpool University. His career was spent at UCD, where he supervised numerous theses and wrote two books. His research interests include quadratic and hermitian forms.

Links: UCD IMS

Philip Boland was born 20 Apr in Syracuse, New York. He was educated at Le Moyne College and the University of Rochester. During his 36 years on the staff at UCD his interests shifted from analysis to probability and statistics. He founded the statistics department there and also started the actuarial and financial studies programme. His books include Statistical and Probabilistic Methods in Actuarial Science.

Link: UCD

Rod Gow was born 4 Jun in Glasgow and brought up in York. He was educated at Cambridge and the University of Liverpool. He worked for over 30 years at UCD, where his primary interests have been in group representation theory, linear algebra and field theory. He is also a noted expert on the history of 19th century mathematics.

Link: UCD

Susan Lazarus was born 25 Jun in the USA, and was educated at Pomona College, Berkeley and UCD. She works at DIT, and does research in algebra.

Links: DIT

Physicist Stefan Hutzler was born 1 Oct in Regensburg, Germany, and was educated there and at TCD. His career to date has been spent at TCD as part of the foams and complex systems group. He also applies statistical physics to financial risk analysis, and has supervised numerous theses.

Links: TCD 1 TCD 2

James R. (Dick) Timoney (1909-1985) born 17 May in Belleek, Fermanagh. He was educated at UCD, and studied with E. T. Whittaker at the University of Edinburgh, before serving 47 years on the staff at UCD.

Links: IMS UCD

Statistician Adele Marshall was born in Fermanagh, and was educated at the University of Coleraine. She teaches at QUB.

Link: QUB

Patrick d'Arcy (1725-1779) was born 27 Sep in Kiltulla Castle, Galway, and was educated privately in Paris, following which he had a successful career in the French army. He is remembered for his contributions to dynamics, especially angular momentum.

Links: Wikipedia 1 Wikipedia 2 Wikipedia 3 Hist of Ireland

Martin J. Newell (1910-1985) was born 30 July in Galway, and educated at UCG. He also studied quantum physics at Cambridge, before teaching at UCG for 40 years, finally serving as president of the college. He was father to algebraist Martin L. Newell.

Links: Wikipedia IMS

Mathematical physicist Sheila Tinney (née Power, 1918-2010) was born 15 Jan in Galway, where her father was professor of maths. She was educated at UCD and the University of Edinburgh. Her 1941 PhD (supervised by Max Born) made her the first Irish woman graduate to get a doctorate in the mathematical sciences. She was also one of the first three scholars at the then new Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. She served on the staff at UCD for over a third of a century, rising to the rank of deputy head, and introducing generations of students to quantum physics.

Links: MacTutor Obit

Theoretical physicist James J. McMahon (1924-1981) was born in Woodford, Galway, and was educated at Maynooth and the DIAS. Ordained a priest, he taught for two decades at Maynooth, then left the priesthood. After a few years in Nigeria, he spent his final years on the staff at Thomond in Limerick.

Link: IMS

Ted Hurley was born 22 Sep in Tuam, Galway. He was educated at UCG and at Queen Mary College, London, and after stints in Sheffield and at UCD he taught for 30 years at UCG/NUIG. His interests include group theory and coding and cryptography. He is passionate about mathematics education, and has written about it for the Irish Times. Four of his sons studied maths in university and went on to get PhDs.

Link: NUIG

Martin L. Newell (son of mathematician Martin J. Newell) was born 16 Sep in Galway city, and was educated at UCG and Frankfurt. His 1966 PhD on "Poly-e-Gruppen" was done under Reinhold Baer. He first taught at Queen Mary in London before returning to UCG/NUIG for 35 years. He has edited two conference proceedings on group theory. His son John is also a mathematician.

Links: Wikipedia NUIG

Rachel Quinlan was born 25 Jul in Galway, and was educated at UCG/NUIG and the University of Alberta. She first taught at UCD and then settled at NUIG where she has supervised doctoral theses in algebra. Her interests include linear algebra and its interactions with group theory, combinatorics, and field theory.

Link: NUIG

Anna Hanna (1991-2002) was born 7 Oct on Inisheer, and was educated at home. In her short life she showed an unusual aptitude for the recognition of composite numbers. As a result, she tabled complete factorizations of all primes up to 10^6, and all even primes up to 10^12.

Rex Dark was born 27 Dec in Huddersfield, spent his childhood in Leatherhead, Surrey, and was educated at Cambridge. After a few years teaching there, he moved to UCG, where he worked for thirty years. His research is in group theory, and he constructed the first known example of a complete group of odd order.

Link: NUIG

Mathematical physicist George Minchin (1845-1914) was 28 May born in Valentia, Kerry, and was educated at TCD. He worked for 3 decades at the Royal Indian Engineering College, in Surrey, and finished his career at Oxford. He wrote book on statics, kinematics, and mathematical drawing.

Links: Bio Bio2

Lexicographer Patrick Dinneen (1860-1934) was born 25 Dec in Rathmore, Kerry. After earning a BA and MA in mathematics from the Catholic University of Ireland, he taught English, Irish, Classics and maths at many schools, before authoring the landmark Irish-English dictionary, Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla.

Links: Wikipedia

Theoretical physicist Alfred O'Rahilly (1884-1969) was born 1 Oct in Listowel, Kerry, and was educated at UCD. He served on the staff at UCC for 40 years, including stints as registrar and president.

Links: Wikipedia UCD Bio

David Walsh was born 9 Sep in Ballylongford, Kerry, and was educated at UCC and Swansea. His career was spent at Maynooth, where his work in analysis included the study of approximation problems in several complex variables and integral inequalities.

Oliver Mason was born 2 December in Tralee, Kerry, and was educated at TCD and Maynooth. He teaches at Maynooth, where he has had 3 PhD students.

Maynooth

Stephen O'Brien (1918-1992) was born 5 Feb in Nurney, Kildare. Having come first in Ireland in both maths and applied maths in the Leaving Cert in 1936, he was educated at UCD, following which he worked on the staff there for 47 years. In the 1950s, he was also a scholar at DIAS, and published two papers with J. L. Synge. He was an early proponent of the use of computers in mathematics.

Links: UCD1 UCD2

Mark Walsh was born 4 Oct in Kildare, and educated at Maynooth and the University of Oregon. A geometric topologist, he now works at Wichita State University in Kansas.

Link: Wichita

Anthony Cronin was born on 16 Dec in Rathangan, Kildare, and was educated at NUIG and UCD. He now works at UCD, pursuing dual interests in matrix theory and mathematics education. He is deeply involved with the Irish Mathematics Learning Support Network.

Links: UCD IMLSN

André Darré (1750-1833) was born in Auch, near Toulouse. A priest, Abbé Darré lectured at the then-new St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, from 1797 to 1813, and is remembered for his text Elements of Geometry with Both Plane and Spherical Trigonometry.

Link: SPC Web

David Wraith was born in Nov in Sheffield, England, and was educated at Cambridge and Notre Dame. His career to date has been spent at Maynooth. He recently received a National Expert Teaching Award and co-authored the book Moduli Spaces of Riemannian Metrics.

Link: Maynooth

Philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753) was born on 12 Mar in Kilkenny. He was educated at TCD and wrote a critique of the foundations of calculus. The University of California at Berkeley is named after him (though pronounced differently).

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

Applied mathematician Michael Carroll (1936-2016) was born 8 Dec in Urlingford, Kilkenny. He studied mechanical engineering at UCG and Brown, and spent his career at Berkeley and Rice University, also serving as dean. His interests were in mechanics, electromagnetism, and acoustics. He was also a playwright, and had crosswords published in the New York Times.

Links: Irish Times Berkeley Rice

Applied mathematician Jim Grannell was born in Wexford, and grew up in Kilkenny. He was educated at UCC, where he spent most of his career.

Link: UCC

Paddy Dowling was born in Kilkenny, and was educated at UCD and Kent State University. At analyst by training, he has spend his career at Miami University, Ohio.

Link: Web

Statistician Fiona Boland was born in Kilkenny, and was educated at UCD. She lectured at UCD before moving to the Royal College of Surgeons.

Link: RCSI

Astronomer William Monck (1839-1915) was born 21 April in Skeirke, Laois, and was brought up there and in Inistioge, Kilkenny. He was educated at TCD, and later taught there for some years. He wrote books on moral philosophy, logic and astronomy.

Links: Wikipedia Bio Astro Chess

Mathematics education expert Joe Travers was born 4 Oct in Portlaoise, Laois, and was educated at TCD, Maynooth and QUB. After a decade of secondary teaching, he settled at St. Patrick's, Drumcondra.

Link: SPD

James Booth (1806-1878) was born 26 Aug in Lavagh, Leitrim, and was educated at TCD. He taught at TCD, then at Bristol College, and finally at Liverpool Collegiate Institution. While he then left academia to take a vicarage, he published mathematics throughout his life, including several books.

Links: Wikipedia TEM

Matthew Collins (1771-1849) was born in Ballingarry, Limerick, and educated at TCD, where he served as Professor of Maths.

Link: Obit

John Walsh (1786?-1847) was born in Shandrumm, Limerick, and became a teacher in Cork. His mathematically eccentric ways drew the attention of both De Morgan and Boole, the latter writing about him that "he laboured under a peculiar mental hallucination". He submitted, without success, a significant number of papers to learned societies, one resulting in an unfavourable report by Poisson and Cauchy.

Link: MacTutor

Henry Hickman Harte (1790-1848) was born in Limerick. He was educated at TCD, where he was served as Donegall Lecturer before moving on to parish work in Tyrone. He published translations of Laplace's Système du Monde & Poisson's Mécanique.

Link: Wikipedia

Andrew Searle Hart (1811-1890) was born 14 Mar in Limerick. He was educated at TCD, and spent his entire career there, rising to the rank of vice-provost. He published treatises on hydrostatics and mechanics, as well as papers on geodesic lines and curves.

Links: Wikipedia DIB

Matthew Collins (1814?-1888?) was born in Limerick, and educated at TCD. He taught at the Mechanics Institute of Liverpool then at TCD for many decades. He authored A tract on the possible and impossible cases of quadratic duplicate inequalities in the diophantice analysis.

Links: Gen Probs Maths Book

John Casey (1820-1891) was born 12 May in Kilbeheny, Limerick. He was self-educated until middle age, when, unusually for a Catholic in that period, he graduated from TCD. He later opted to teach at the Catholic University of Ireland, rather than at TCD where he was also offered a position. He was one of the founders of the modern geometry of triangles and circles, wrote seven books on geometry, and is also remembered for a theorem generalising Ptolomy's theorem.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

Thomas Power (1859? to at least 1921) was born in Limerick. He taught maths at St Patrick's College in Thurles, and later in Limerick.

Links: Census1 Census2

Jane McCutcheon (1868-1956) was born 8 Sep in Limerick city. She was educated at QUB and taught in Belfast.

Links: Census1 Census2

John Enright (1876?-1940) was born in Limerick city and was educated to master's level at UCD. He taught at Knockbeg College, Carlow, then in Longford and Dublin, and later at UCD.

Link: Census 1 Census 2

Éamon de Valera (1882-1975) was born 14 Oct in New York, and grew up in Bruree, Limerick. He earned a maths degree in Dublin from the Royal University of Ireland. He taught at Maynooth and at Caryfort College, as well as at various schools, before turning to nationalist activities, and ultimately entering a long career in politics. In 1940, as Taoiseach, he initiated the foundation of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.

Links: Wikipedia MacT UCD UCC

Gerald Foley (1886-1982) was born 1 Apr in Askeaton, Limerick, and was educated at TCD, where he was a Scholar. His career was mostly spent in the police, first in the RIC and later in a leadership role in Palestine.

Link: DIB Link

Physicist Thomas Nevin (1906-1986) was born in Limerick city, and was educated at UCD, starting his studies in mathematical science. He lectured at UCD for almost half a century, in time serving as department head and dean. He revived the spectroscopy laboratory and started the nuclear emulsion group.

Links: Web UCD

Applied mathematician Paddy Quinlan (1919-2001) was born 7 Dec in Kilmallock, Limerick, and was educated at UCC and Caltech. His 1949 PhD on "A Fourier Integral Approach to an Aeolotropic Medium" was done with Romeo Martel & Frederick Converse. He lectured at UCC for four decades, supervising numerous theses there. He also served as a member of Seanad Éireann, from 1957 to 1977.

Links: Wikipedia Obit

Meteorologist Sean Connolly (1932-2008) was born in Bruff, Limerick, and was educated to master's level at UCG. His entire career was spent in the met office, mainly in Aviation Forecasting at Shannon, rising to become Head of Aviation Services.

Tom Ambrose was born in Newcastle West, Limerick, and was educated at UCD and TCD. His original research was on electromagnetic interactions, and he taught for four decades at Kevin St (later DIT). For most of that time he also taught at UCD.

Link: Interview

Michael A. Hayes (1936-2017) was born on 2 Aug in Kilfinane, Limerick. He grew up there and in Limerick city, and was educated at UCG and at Brown. After some years at the University of East Anglia, he became head of mathematical physics at UCD, where he worked for a quarter of a century. His research was in elasticity theory and the kinematics of deformation. He co-authored the book Bivectors and Waves in Mechanics and Optics (Chapman & Hall, 1993). NUIG recently established a prize in continuum mechanics in his memory.

Link: Obit

Applied mathematician Frank Hodnett (1939-2011) was born 15 Oct in Cork and was educated at UCC and at Leeds. Upon completing his PhD in 1967 on "Magnetogasdynamic Problems Associated with Electric Arcs and the Slow Compressible Flow Past a Circular Cylinder" with Allin Goldsworthy, he spent a few years at the University of Connecticut. In 1974, he joined the staff at NIHE Limerick (later UL), where he worked for three decades. He rose to become department head, supervised several theses and edited two conference proceedings.

Link:

Mick Wallace was born in Limerick, and was educated at UCG. After a decade at Kevin St, he joined the staff at NIHE Limerick (later UL) where he taught for over three decades, rising to department head. His interests are in statistics and quality control. Along with Eamonn Murphy, he founded the National Centre for Quality Management which brought a lot of stats to bear in industry in the mid-West in the 1990s.

Paddy MacNeice (1940-1970) was born in Limerick, and was educated at UCD, first in engineering and then in maths. He taught at UCD for several years before his untimely death.

Gerry Beggan was born in Limerick, and was first educated at UCD. He worked for the department of education, then for almost three decades at UCG's education department, earning his doctorate from ???? along the way.

Link: Interview

Mathematics education expert John O'Donoghue was born in Nenagh, Tipperary, and educated at St John Fisher College in Rochester, at Rensselaer Polytechic and later at Loughborough. His 1978 PhD on "Educating and Training Mathematics Teachers for Secondary Schools in Ireland: a New Perspective on Teacher Education" was done with Avi Bajpai. Most of his career was spent at Thomond College and then at UL, where he supervised over 30 theses at master's and PhD level, and co-authored two books. He was founding co-director of the National Centre for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching and Learning (NCE-MSTL).

Link: UL Interview

Liam O'Callaghan was born in Effin, Limerick, and was educated at UCD and Wesleyan University. His 1976 PhD on "Topological Endohomeomorphism and Compactness Properties of Products and Generalized Sigma-Products" was done with Bill Comfort. He spent most of his career in the aerospace software industry.

Statistician Eamonn Murphy was born in Limerick city and was first educated at St Pat's, Drumcondra, whereupon he taught primary school in Limerick for many years. His 1987 PhD on "An Empirical Study of Information Technology as an Aid to the Teaching of Mathematics in the Primary School" was done at UCD. Along with Mick Wallace, he co-founded the National Centre for Quality Management at NIHE Limerick (now UL). This brought a lot of stats to bear in industry in the mid-West in the 1990s.

Links: UL IT

Eoghan MacAogáin was born in Dublin and educated at TCD, where he was a Scholar, and at Warwick. He career was spent teaching first at Thomond College and then at UL. He is also a flute player with two albums to his name.

Theoretical physicist Charles Nash was born in London, and grew up in Limerick city. He was educated at TCD and Cambridge. His 1973 PhD on "Contributions to Deep Inelastic Scattering" was done with John Polkinghorne. He taught at TCD and Imperial before settling at Maynooth, from which he recently retired after 36 years. He has authored three books, including Topology and Geometry for Physicists (Academic Press, 1983).

Links: Maynooth Symposium

Mathematical physicist Bob Critchley (1948-2007) was born on 8 November in London and was educated at Oxford and DIAS. His 1974 Oxford doctorate on "Some Applications of Representations of the Canonical Commutation Relations" was completed in Dublin with John Lewis. He settled at NIHE Limerick (later UL) where he worked for three decades. He was active in Computer Aided Learning for many years, and also taught for the Open University.

Link: Prize

Pat O'Sullivan was born in Cork and educated entirely at Maynooth. His 1976 PhD was done with Tigran Tchrakian. His entire career was spent at Mary Immaculate College, where his interests ranged from financial mathematics to differential equations and numerical methods, as well as computer use in maths education.

Link: MIC

Des Penny was born in Limerick, and was educated at UCC, where he won an NUI Travelling Studentship Prize, and at the University of Utah, from which he earned his PhD in 1975. Most of his career was spent on the physics and engineering staff at Southern Utah University.

Link: SUU1 SUU2

Michael Barry was born in Limerick city and was educated at UCD, where he won an NUI Travelling Studentship Prize, and at Notre Dame. His 1976 PhD on "Parabolic Subgroups of Groups of Lie Type" was done with Warren Wong. His career started at Carysfort College, following which he has spent three decades at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.

Link: Allegheny

Gerry Enright was born in Kanturk, Cork, and was educated at UCG and Cambridge. His 1977 PhD on "The Structure and Subgroups of the Fischer Groups F₂₂ and F₂₃" was done with John H. Conway. His entire career was spent at Mary Immaculate College, where his interests spanned finite simple sporadic groups, mathematics education, and computers in education.

Link: MIC

Applied mathematician Dick Sheehy was born in Limerick city and was educated entirely at UCC, earning his 1979 PhD on "The Edge-Function Method for Free Vibrations of Isotropic Plates" with Paddy Quinlan and Michael O'Callaghan. His career was spent at CIT, from which he recently retired.

Gordon Lessells was born 9 Nov in Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and was educated at Aberdeen and Oxford. He has been on the staff at NIHE Limerick (now UL) for 35 years, having been at UCC before that. He has long played a leadership role in the Irish Mathematical Olympiad.

Applied mathematician Andrew Fowler was born in Belfast, and educated at Oxford. In 1977 he completed his doctorate on "Glacier Dynamics" with Alan Tayler. He worked at TCD and MIT before returning to teach at Oxford. For the past decade he has been on the staff at UL, specialising in mathematical modelling. He has supervised several theses and written two books, including Mathematical Geoscience (Springer, 2011).

Link: UL

Applied mathematician and computer scientist Liam Tuohey was born in Kilmallock, Limerick, and was educated entirely at UCC, completing his PhD in 1982 on "Application of the Edge Function Method to Potential Problems in Three Dimensions" with Paddy Quinlan. The early part of his career was spent in the aerospace industy, then he joined the computer science staff DCU.

Link: DCU

Diarmuid O'Driscoll was born in Millstreet, Cork, and educated at UCC, where he was awarded an NUI Travelling Studentship Prize. His entire career has been spent at Mary Immaculate College, where he currently serves as department head. His interests have ranged from IT in the primary school curriculum to regression analysis and measurement error models.

Link: MIC

John Kinsella was born in Dublin and educated entirely at UCD, earning his 1980 PhD on "Crossing Symmetry for Production Amplitudes and Sum Rules for Partial Waves" with John Kennedy. He then joined the staff at NIHE Limerick (now UL), where his interests include constrained optimisation.

Link: UL

Statistician Gerard Scallan was born in Limerick and was educated at UCG, where he won an NUI Travelling Studentship. After some postgraduate studies at both Graz and Stanford, he settled in Paris, where he specialises in modelling techniques for both scorecards and financial models.

Link: Scorplus

Avril Hegarty (née Reynolds) was born in Dublin and educated at TCD and UL. Her 2003 PhD on "Bayesian Disease Mapping using Product Partition Models" was done with Don Barry. Her career has been spent at UL, where she specialises in applying maths to the biomechanics and technology sectors.

Link: UL

Ray Johnstone was born in Limerick and was educated at UCG, where he won an NUI Travelling Studentship Prize. After some postgraduate studies at Leeds, he settled in the USA, where he works in the software industry.

Link:

Statistician Don Barry was born in Cork and was educated at UCD, where he won an NUI Travelling Studentship, and then at Yale. His 1983 PhD on "Non-Parametric Bayesian Regression" was done with John Hartigan. He started his career at UCC, where he served as department head, and then he moved to UL, where he recently completed a decade as president. He has supervised several PhDs.

Link: HSE

Engineer Mark Burke was born in Dublin and was educated at UCD and Northwestern. His 1983? PhD on "" was done with XY. He then joined the maths staff at NIHE Limerick (now UL), where his interests include control theory and nonlinear dynamics.

Link: UL

Alan Hegarty was born in Dublin and was educated at TCD. Following his 1986 PhD on "Analysis of Finite Difference Methods for Two-Dimensional Elliptic Singular Perturbation Problems" done with John Miller, he joined the staff at NIHE Limerick (now UL), where he currently serves as head of department. His main research interest is on the numerical solution of singular perturbation problems, and he has co-edited one conference proceedings book.

Link: UL

Eugene Gath was born 10 Mar in Dublin, grew up in Waterford and was educated at UCD, where he won an NUI Travelling Studentship Prize, and at MIT. His 1989 PhD on "Exact Results in Quantum Field Theory: The Spinor Lehmann Representation in Anti-de Sitter Space and the Superconformal Thirring Ghosts" was done with Dan Freedman. Most of his career has been spent at UL, where his original focus on relativity, conformal field theory and string theory has given way to applications of mathematics and statistics, especially financial mathematics.

Link: UL

Applied mathematician Eugene Benilov was born 22 Jul in Moscow, Russia, and was educated there, earning his 1988 PhD on "Instability of Ideal Fluid Flows over an Uneven Bottom" at the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, with V. E. Zakharov. After a spell in Australia (and two years at Warwick) he settled at UL. He has supervised numerous theses, and was part of the team that solved a longstanding mystery about sinking bubbles in glasses of stout.

Links: UL Bubbles

Theoretical physicist Diarmuid Ó Sé was born in Limerick city and grew up nearby in Ardnacrusha, Clare. He was educated at Maynooth, finishing his 1986 PhD on "Classical Gauge Field Solutions and Their Topological Properties" with Tigran Tchrakian at DIAS. His career has been spent in IT Carlow, where his interests have broadened to include maths learning support and management science. His career has been spent in IT Carlow, where his interests have broadened to include maths learning support and management science.

Link: IT Carlow

Hubert O'Driscoll was born in Doon, Limerick and was first educated at UCD—where he qualified as a vet before persuing maths—and at Notre Dame. His 1989 PhD on "Isomorphisms of saturated subgroups of PO₆" was done with Alex Hahn. His career has been spent as a veterinarian in rural Limerick.

Link: Vet

Applied mathematician Stephen B. O'Brien was born in Cork and educated at UCC and Oxford. His 1992 doctorate on "Free Boundary Problems from Industry" with Alan Tayler was done after he'd worked for a while for Philips in Holland. He has long been at UL, where he currently co-directs the Mathematics Applications Consortium for Science and Industry (MACSI). He has supervised numerous theses.

Link: UL

Bernd Kreussler was born in Germany and educated entirely at Humboldt University in Berlin. His 1989 doctorate on ""Twistorräume und kleine Auflösungen von Doppelüberlagerungen des P^3, die über einer Quartik mit genau 13 gewöhnlichen Doppelpunkten verzweigt sind" was done with Herbert Kurke. After a decade on the staff at Kaiserslautern, he settled at Mary Immaculate College, where his interests include complex algebraic geometry and homological algebra as well as homological mirror symmetry. He has co-authored two books, including "Vector Bundles on Degenerations of Elliptic Curves and Yang-Baxter Equations" (AMS, 2012). He is very active in the Irish Mathematical Olympiad.

Link: MIC

Cliff Nolan was born in Cork and educated at UCG, TCD and Rice. His 1997 PhD on "Global Analysis of Linearized Inversion for the Acoustic Wave Equation" was done with William Symes. Since then he has mostly been at UL, where his interests include inverse problems, microlocal analysis, and anisotropic wave propagation and scattering. He also maintains an adjunct research position at Rensselaer Polytechnic.

Oliver P. Murphy was born in Limerick city and was educated at UCC, where he did his 1995 PhD on "A Robust Model Fitting Technique" with Don Barry. His has taught business studies at IT Tralee since the mid-1990s, and currently serves as president there.

Ali Ansari was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and grew up there and in the United Arab Emirates. He arrived in Limerick in time to do his Leaving Cert and was educated entirely at NIHE/UL. Following his PhD 2001 "On the Use of Shishkin Meshes to Obtain Parameter Robust Numerical Solutions of Singularly Perturbed Differential Equations" under Alan Hegarty he remained on the staff there for a few years, supervising two PhDs himself. The bulk of his career has been spent at the Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait, where he has served as department head and dean.

Link: GUST

Pat Doody was born in Ballingarry, Limerick, and was educated at UL, where in 1998 he did his PhD on "Bounding and Controlling the Generalisation Error in Feedforward Neural Networks" under John Kinsella. He has long taught statistics at IT Tralee, and is currently involved with the Intelligent Mechatronics and RFID (IMaR) Gateway project there.

Link: LI

Natalia Kopteva was born 22 Aug in Moscow, and was educated at Moscow State University, earning her 1997 PhD on "Uniform grid methods for certain singularly perturbed equations on layer-adapted grids" with Vladimir Andreev. She has taught at UL for fifteen years, and has co-edited one conference proceedings book. Her area of research is numerical analysis for partial differential equations.

Link: UL

Statistician Ailish Hannigan was born in Limerick, and was educated at UL and UCD. Her 1997 PhD on "Survival Analysis—A New Approach to Analysing Three Year Caries Clinical Trials" was done with Don Barry. Most of her career has been spent at UL, first in maths and now on the biostats staff.

Link: UL

Statistician Kevin Hayes was born in Dublin and was educated entirely at TCD. His PhD was done with John Haslett. His entire career has been spent at UL. His main research area is in the statistical analysis of curve data as applied to the area of human biomechanics.

Link: UL

Applied mathematician James Gleeson was born 19 Apr in Nenagh, Tipperary, and was educated at UCD and Caltech. His 1999 PhD on "Random Advection of a Passive Scalar" was done with Phil Saffman. He started his career at UCC before settling at the University of Limerick, where he currently co-directs the Mathematics Applications Consortium for Science and Industry (MACSI). He has supervised many theses.

Link: UL

Mathematical educator Olivia Fitzmaurice (née Gill) was born on 19 Oct in Kilnaleck, Cavan, and was educated at UL and Maynooth. Her 2006 PhD was on "What Counts as Service Mathematics?: An Investigation into the 'Mathematics Problem' in Ireland" was done with John O'Donoghue. After some secondary teaching, she returned to UL. Her research areas include adult learners of mathematics, service mathematics, the Irish Mathematics Learning Support Network (IMLSN) and mathematics in initial teacher education.

Link: UL

Norbert Hoffmann was born in Germany and educated at Göttingen and Bonn. His 2002 doctorate "On vector bundles over algebraic and arithmetic curves" was done with Gerd Faltings. After a decade at the Free University of Berlin he settled at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick. His research interests are in algebraic vector bundles and principal bundles and in moduli spaces and moduli stacks.

Link: MIC

Statistician Helen Purtill (née Mac Mullen) was born on 26 May in Killybegs, Donegal, and was educated at DCU and at Sheffield Hallam. Her 2000 PhD on "Schwarz Domain Decomposition Methods for Singularly Perturbed Differential Equations" was done with Eugene O'Riordan at DCU. She has long been based at UL, where she is actively involved in interdisciplinary research with numerous collaborators.

Link: UL

Applied mathematician Ray McNamara (1974-2004) was born in Scariff, Clare, and was educated entirely at NIHE/UL. His 2000 PhD on "Numerical Solutions of the Planetary Geostrophic Equations with Applications to Ocean Modelling" was done with Frank Hodnett. He then joined the staff at Mary Immaculate College where he worked until his early death.

Link: Run

Applied mathematician Sarah Mitchell was born on 14 June in Bristol, England. Her education was entirely at Bath. Her 2003 PhD on "Coupling Transport and Chemistry: Numerics, Analysis and Applications" was done with Alastair Spence. She worked at the Universities of British Columbia and Cape Town before settling at UL, where she is currently department head. Her interests are in numerical and mathematical modelling of moving boundary problems relevant to solidification, melting and polymer diffusion.

Link: UL

Ronan Flatley was born in Dublin and brought up in Sligo town and Letterkenny, Donegal. He was educated entirely at UCD—first in engineering—earning his 2012 PhD on "Symbol Algebras, Involutions and Trace Forms" with Thomas Unger & Dave Lewis. He now teaches at Mary Immaculate College, and his interests include central simple algebras with involution and the algebraic theory of quadratic forms.

Link: MIC

Maths education expert Paddy Johnson was born in Laois and educated entirely at UL. In 2006, he completed his PhD on "An Investigation of Permanence and Exclusion in a Two-Dimensional Discrete Time Competing Species Model" with Mark Burke. His career has been spent at UL, first in maths and now on the education staff.

Link: UL

Romina Gaburro was born in Italy and was educated at Trieste and Manchester. Her 2003 PhD on "Anisotropic Conductivity Inverse Boundary Value Problems" was done with Bill Lionheart. She has long been on the UL staff, where her interests include inverse problems.

Link: UL Video

Colin Wilmott was born in Pallaskenry, Limerick, and was educated at UCC and Royal Holloway. His 2006 PhD on "On Quantum Codes and Networks" was done with Peter Wild. After some positions at UCD, Duesseldorf and Masaryk, he settled at Nottingham Trent University, where his focus is on open quantum systems and the physics of information.

Link: NTU

Statistitian Norma Bargary (née Coffey) was born in Cork or Limerick and educated entirely at UL. Her 2008 PhD was done with Kevin Hayes. After some postdoc positions she settled back at UL where her main area of interest is in the statistical modelling of time-course/functional data using the mixed effects model, especially as applied to biological data.

Link: UL

Alan McCarthy was born 2 Jan in Askeaton, Limerick, and educated entirely at UCC. Since completing his 2014 PhD on "Flat Surfaces on Finite Type in 3-Sphere" with Martin Kilian he has taught at the University of New South Wales and then at the University of Notre Dame (Sidney). His areas of research are differential and discrete geometry.

Link: UND

Statistician David Hawe was born in Limerick and educated at UL and UCC. In 2014 he completed his PhD on "Statistical Considerations in the Kinetic Analysis of PET-FDG Brain Tumour Studies" with Finbarr O'Sullivan. He now teaches at CIT.

Link: CIT

Statistician Kevin Burke was born in Tipperary and educated entirely at UL. His 2014 PhD on "Multi-Parameter Regression Survival Models" was done with MacKenzie & Murphy. He now teaches at UL where his research interests include survival analysis, i.e., is the statistical analysis of time-to-event data.

Link: UL

Philip Gormley (1910-1973) was born 22 Aug in Claudy, near Derry, and was educated at UCD and at the University of Edinburgh. He taught at UCD for 40 years, and was a keen translator of Russian mathematics.

Link: IMS

Theoretical physicist Barry Spain (1914-2007) was born 18 Nov in Londonderry, and was educated at TCD and the University of Edinburgh. His career was spent at Imperial College, TCD, and Sir John Cass College. He wrote five books, on tensor calculus, conics, quadrics, ODEs and the functions of maths physics. His son Philip is also a mathematician.

Theortical physicist Raymond Flannery (1941-2013) was born 8 Jan in Claudy, Londonderry, and was educated at QUB. He worked at Harvard then spent the rest of his career at Georgia Tech. His research was in the theory of atomic and molecular collision processes.

Links: Gatech Obit 2

Applied mathematician James Caldwell was born 16 May in Macosquin, Londonderry, and was educated at QUB and Teesside University. Most of his career was spent at the University of Southern Queensland (Toowoomba), Sunderland Polytechnic, and the City University of Hong Kong. He has written postgraduate level textbooks in mathematical modelling.

Links: Wikipedia Prabook

John Toland was born 28 Apr in Londonderry, and was educated at QUB and the University of Sussex. He has spent his career at University College London and at Bath, and more recently became director of the Isaac Newton Institute at Cambridge. In 1978, he proved Stokes' conjecture on the existence of gravity waves of maximum height on deep water.

Links: Wikipedia Cambridge

Theoretical physicist Derrick Crothers (1942-2021) was born on 24 Jun in Belfast, and grew up there are in Cookstown, Tyrone. He was educated at Oxford and QUB. He taught for over four decades years at QUB where he supervised over thirty PhD students and wrote three books.

Links: Wikipedia

Economist and actuary Phelim Boyle was born 29 Jun in Levey, Londonderry, and was educated at QUB and TCD. He first specialised in theoertical physics, and then moved into quantitative finance. He is best known for initiating the use of Monte Carlo methods in option pricing in the 1980s. He has taught at the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University, in Canada.

Links: Wikipedia Laurier

Statistician Norma Glasgo Reid was born 28 Apr in Limavady, Londonderry, and was educated at Sussex University and Coleraine. She has worked in health services research and nurse education, especially at Coleraine and Coventry, publishing two key books. She later worked in university administration in South Africa.

Link: Wikipedia

Statistician Claire Gormley was born in Londonderry, and was educated at TCD. She now teaches at UCD. Her research interests include latent variable models, mixture models, rank data models, computational statistics and Bayesian statistics.

Link: UCD

Andrew Young (1919-1992) was born 16 Dec in Edentown, Lancashire, grew up in Scotland, and was educated at St Andrews and the Univ of Liverpool. After 20 years on the staff at Liverpool, he moved to Coleraine, Londonderry. There he worked for 15 years and supervised over 20 PhD theses in numerical analysis.

Link: Obit

Political economist and statistician Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (1845-1926) was born 8 Feb in Edgeworthstown, Longford. He didn’t study maths and economics until after he’d earned degrees in languages and law from TCD and Oxford, but later published a lot in mathematical economics.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

Theoretical physicist Ciaran Ryan (1934-1973) was born in Westmeath and brought up in Longford. He was educated at Maynooth and the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. A priest too, he taught at the University of Rochester and at UCD, and authored one book. He died young in a mountaineering accident near Geneva.

Links: IMS Web

Muiris O Sirium was born 7 Oct in Cuba, to an Irish father and a Russian mother. He grew up in Longford and was educated at UCD—to which he cycled daily from Keenagh for lectures—and Leningrad. He spent over 40 years teaching at Terminfeckin, and wrote the first book on algebraic codology published in both Irish and Russian. On 16 Oct 1990, he missed the first Hamilton Walk to Broom Bridge.

Physicist Nicholas Callan (1799-1864) was born 22 Dec in Darver, Louth, and educated at Maynooth, and at La Sapienza in Rome. He lectured at Maynooth for 4 decades. Electricity and magnetism were his specialities, and his is most well known for his invention of the induction coil.

Links: Wikipedia Maynooth Bio

James Cullen (1867-1933) was born 19 Apr in Drogheda, Louth. He studied maths at TCD but left and later became a Jesuit priest. He taught maths in England, and published about numbers of the form n (2ⁿ+1), which are now known as Cullen numbers. Are there infinitely many such numbers which are prime, such as when n = 1, 141, or 4713? This is still an open question.

Links: Wikipedia Wikipedia 2 Fermat Search

Brendan Steen (1921-2015) was born 29 Nov in Ardee, Louth, and was educated at UCD. A Vincentian priest, he was considered to be one of the giants of maths education in Ireland. Over his long career, he taught at Castleknock College, St. Paul's, Raheny, and St. Peter's, Phibsborough. He co-founded the maths department at St. Patrick's College, Drumcondra, and was Treasurer of the Dublin Branch of the IMTA for 50 years, only retiring in 2014.

Link: SPD Obit

Don McQuillan was born in Dundalk, Louth, as was educated at UCG and at Johns Hopkins University, earning his 1961 PhD on "A Generalisation of a Theorem of Heck" with Jun-Ichi Igusa. His career was spent at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and at UCD. Over the past few decades he has become a sought after expert on quality assurance, most recently at the Vatican.

Link: Ovidius

Brian Smyth was born in Dundalk, Louth, and was educated at UCG and Brown. He's a differential geometer, and has been at Notre Dame for most of his career.

Link: Notre Dame

Johnny Burns was born 4 May in Dundalk, Louth, and was educated at UCG and Notre Dame. He taught at Kevin Street before settling at UCG. His research interests include differential geometry, Lie groups, algebra, Lie algebras and group theory.

Link: NUIG

Fiacre Ó Cairbre was born 21 Jun in Drogheda, Louth, and was educated at Maynooth and Berkeley. He teaches at Maynooth, and for many years has lead the Hamilton Walk in Dublin, each 16 Oct, from Dunsink Observatory to Broom Bridge. He's also very active in Maths Week outreach.

Links: Maynooth Hamilton Walk

Padraig Kirwan was born in Dundalk, Louth, and was educated at UCG. He teaches at WIT and has been very active in Maths Week outreach.

Links: WIT

Mary Hall was born in Louth, and was educated at Heriot-Watt and the University of Birmingham. She is an actuary and teaches at UCD.

Links:

Mathematical physicist John Donaghey (1878-1949) was born 3 Dec in Kilmovee, Mayo. He was educated at RUI and Bonn, and at Munich with Röntgen. He taught at Maynooth and Munich, and then for another 25 years at Marquette University (Wisconsin) and Incarnate Word College (Texas).

Tom Laffey was born 5 Dec in Cross, Mayo, and was educated at UCG and the University of Sussex. His 1968 PhD on "Structure Theorems for Linear Groups" was done under Walter Ledermann. For over 40 years he lectured at UCD, pursuing research in group theory and linear algebra. He also played a major role in the successful establishment of the Irish Mathematical Olympiad.

Links: UCD IMS

Des MacHale was born 28 Jan in Castlebar, Mayo, and was educated at UCG and the University of Keele. He has spent his entire career at UCC, working in group and ring theory. He wrote the definitive biography of George Boole, the first Professor of Mathematics at what was then Queen's College, Cork. He has also authored a large number of books on puzzles and humour.

Links: Wikipedia UCC

Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin was born 16 Mar and is from Carnacon, Mayo. She studied theoretical physics at UCD, and recently completed a doctorate in mathematics education in TCD. She has taught mathematics and physics at secondary level, and now lectures in mathematics pedagogy at UCD. She is also an experienced radio and TV broadcaster.

Links: Wikipedia UCD

Noel Brady is from Kilbride, Meath, and was educated at TCD and at Berkeley. He works at the University of Oklahoma, and his research interests are in geometric group theory and low dimensional topology. He has supervised several PhD theses.

Link: UO

Fergus Gaughran was born in Navan, Meath, and was educated at UCD. A credit risk expert, he's worked for AIB and Ulster Bank.

Link: LinkedIn

Dermot Marron was born in Clones, Monaghan and educated at QUB. He published some papers in topology, and moved into a career in the actuarial world.

Link: Allied Risk

Ciarán Mac an Bhaird was born 6 Jul in Monaghan and was educated at Maynooth, where he now works. His interests include algebraic number theory and maths education.

Link: Maynooth

Physicist George Johnstone Stoney (1826-1911) was born 15 Feb near Birr, Offaly. He was educated at TCD and spent his early career at Birr Castle and at Queen's College, Galway. He then moved back Dublin for decades of work in educational administration, all the while publishing in the areas of cosmic physics and the theory of gases. He introduced the term "electron" in 1891.

Links: Wikipidia Ency Brit RDS

Mathematician, geophysicist and social activist Gerry Gardner (1926-2009) was born 2 Mar in Tullamore, Offaly. Educated at TCD and Princeton, he worked in the USA in the oil and natural gas industries. A statistical analysis of his was used in a US Supreme Court decision.

Links: Wikipedia SEG

Annette Pilkington was born 16 Jan in Daingean, Offaly. She was educated at UCD and at the University of Notre Dame, where she now teaches. She is an algebraist whose research interests are in classical groups, K-theory, and representation theory.

Links: Notre Dame

Atmospheric scientist Paul O'Gorman was born in Tullamore, Offaly, and was educated at TCD and Caltech. He now works at MIT on atmospheric dynamics and the hydrological cycle. He's particularly interested in the behavior of precipitation and the general circulation in different climates.

Link: MIT

Mathematical physicist Joseph Spelman (1932-2016) was born on 2 Sep in Ballaghaderreen, Roscommon, and was educated at Maynooth. He also studied at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies and at Stanford. After lecturing for over 20 years at Maynooth, in 1992 he moved to Sligo to work fulltime as a priest until his 2007 retirement.

Links: Sligo Today Obit

Computational biologist Shaun Mahony was born in Castlerea, Roscommon. He studied electronic and computer engineering at NUIG and switched to computational biology for his doctorate. He worked at the CS/AI lab at MIT before settling at Penn State Univ.

Link: Penn State

Mathematical physicist George Stokes (1819-1903) was born 13 Aug in Skreen, Sligo. His education and entire professional life was at Cambridge (BA 1841, senior wrangler). His considerable legacy includes work in physical optics and asymptotic expansions, Stokes' theorem in multivariable calculus, and the Navier-Stokes equations in fluid dynamics.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

Theoretical physicist Jim Hamilton (1918-2000) was born 29 Jan in Sligo town, and brought up in Belfast. He was educated at QUB and Manchester, and his career included notable stints at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Cambridge, University College London, and Nordita in Copenhagen. At DIAS, he helped develop the theory of of cosmic-ray mesons, and his later work included S-matrix theory research.

Links: Wikipedia CERN Bio

Sean McGarraghy was born in Sligo. His education was at UCD, first in electrical engineering, then switching to maths, completing a doctorate in algebra. His career has been in business analytics, which he now heads up at UCD. His interests include network and natural computing algorithms.

Link: UCD

Oisin Mac Conamhna was born in Sligo, and was educated at Cambridge. After completing a doctorate in theoretical physics with Stephen Hawking, he worked at Imperial College for three years, then switched to quantitative finance.

Link: Web

John Jellett (1817-1888) was born 25 Dec in Cashel, Tipperary. He was educated at TCD where he also spent his whole career, rising to the rank of Provost. He published in pure and applied mathematics, as well as on theological matters, and authored several books. He was an early supporter of the proposal to admit women to the university, and served as commissioner of Irish national education.

Links: Wikipedia TCD AAI

Pádraig de Brún (1889-1960) was born 13 Oct in Grangemockler, Tipperary, and was educated at UCD and the Sorbonne. He spent three decades at St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, before becoming president of UCG. A priest and a classics and Irish scholar, as well as a mathematician, he wrote the famous poem "Thánaig Long ó Valparaiso".

Links: Wikipedia Aimn

Sean Tobin was born 16 Jan in Moneygall, Tipperary, and was educated at UCG and at Manchester. He spent 40 years at UCG, spearheading an algebra and group theory focus there. He is perhaps best known for his early work on the Burnside Problem.

Link: NUIG Burnside

John O'Donoghue was born 24 Feb in Nenagh, Tipperary, and was educated at St John Fisher College (Rochester), Rensselaer Polytechnic, and at Loughborough. His career has been spent at Thomond College and the University of Limerick, specialising in mathematics education in particular. He was a founding director of the NCE-MSTL, now EPI-STEM. He has written two books and supervised numerous theses.

Link: UL EPI-STEM ALM

John Ryan was born 27 Feb in Holycross, Tipperary. His mathematics education was all completed at UCC. For over thirty years he's been a missionary priest working in Malawi. He taught for many years at Mzuzu University, specialising in coding theory, before recently being ordained as a bishop.

Links: Malawi 1 Malawi 2

Neil Hallinan was born 21 Mar in Aughavoulimane, Tipperary, and was educated at UCD and UWE, Bristol. For thirty-six years he taught at St. Mary's, Holy Faith Convent, Glasnevin. He's been involved with the IMTA since the early 1980s, and for ten years served as editor of the IMTA Newsletter. He's co-ordinating the Archives of the IMTA, at Maynooth University.

Links: IMTA Archives 1 IMTA Archives 2

Applied mathematician James Gleeson was born 19 Apr in Nenagh, Tipperary, and was educated at UCD and Caltech. His 1999 PhD on "Random Advection of a Passive Scalar" was done with Phil Saffman. He started his career at UCC before settling at the University of Limerick, where he currently co-directs the Mathematics Applications Consortium for Science and Industry (MACSI). He has supervised many theses.

Link: UL

James MacCullagh (1809-1847) was born in Landahaussy, Tyrone, and was educated at TCD, where he spent his all-too-brief career. He worked both in optics and geometry, and is credited with introducing what is now called the curl of a vector field. Some of his work found new appreciation over thirty years after his death.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

William Snow Burnside (1839-1920) was born 20 Dec in Corcreevy, Tyrone. He was educated at TCD, studying with George Salmon, and was on the staff there for over 40 years. He was remembered as "the last man to arrive regularly in College on horseback." He co-authored the book The Theory of Equations: With an Introduction to the Theory of Binary Algebraic Forms, which sold very well for many decades.

Link: Obit

John Henry MacFarland (1851-1935) was born 19 Apr in Omagh, Tyrone, and was educated at Queen's College, Belfast, and at Cambridge. After some secondary school teaching in Derbyshire, he settled at Melbourne University where he served half a century on the university council, and was also chancellor.

Links: Wikipedia Australian Dict of Biog

Astronomer Annie Maunder (née Russell, 1868-1947) was born 14 Apr in Strabane, Tyrone. In 1889 she was the highest ranked mathematics student at the BA examinations at Girton College, Cambridge, but as a woman was denied a degree. For decades she pursued solar research at Greenwich Royal Observatory, often publishing her findings under her husband's name.

Link: Wikipedia Irish Times

Edgar Harper (1880-1916) was born 4 Jul in Dungannon, Tyrone. He earned a BA and MA from the Royal University of Ireland, and taught at the University of North Wales in Bangor, where he co-authored a book on the mathematics of flying. He became Professor of Mathematics at UCC in 1913, but in 1915 obtained an army commission and left. In Jul 1916, he died during the Battle of Albert at the Somme.

Links: War DeadNature

Frank Murnaghan (1893-1976) was born 4 Aug in Omagh, Tyrone. He was educated at UCD and then at Johns Hopkins. He later spent 30 years on the staff at Johns Hopkins and wrote 16 books on various topics in mathematics and mathematical physics.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor

Logician John Faris (1913-2011) was born 15 Mar in Caledon, Tyrone, and studied classics—including philosophy and logic—at Oxford. His career was spent in the department of logic and metaphysics at QUB, where he authored three books.

Link: Obit

Mathematical physicist David Bates (1916-1994) was born on 18 Nov in Omagh, Tyrone. He was educated at QUB and University College London, and later taught at both institutions. He worked in atmospheric and molecular physics, and was a founding member of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland.

Links: Wikipedia RAS

Derek Burgess was born in Tyrone and educated at QUB and Cambridge. After a few years in Paris and at Magee in Londonderry, he returned to QUB where he served for four decades. He supervised several PhD theses in topology, and authored the 1966 textbook Analytical Topology.

Link: Math Gen

Statistician Peter McCullagh was born 8 Jan near Plumbridge, Tyrone, and was educated at Birmingham and Imperial College. Most of his career has been spent at the Univ of Chicago, where he has authored a book and supervised numerous theses.

Links: Wikipedia UC

Robert Boyle (1627-1691) was born 25 Jan in Lismore, Waterford, and as a child was educated privately and at Eton, as well as in Italy. He was one of the most important figures of the period known as the Scientific Revolution, and is best known for Boyle's law which describes the inversely proportional relationship between the pressure and volume of a gas.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor Birkbeck

Physicist Ernest Walton (1903-1995) was born 6 Oct in Dungarvan, Waterford, and his family moved around Ireland a great deal when he was young. He studied maths and physics at TCD and Cambridge, and his "splitting the atom" with John Cockroft in the early 1930s lead to the two men later sharing a Nobel prize. He lectured at TCD for four decades.

Links: Wikipedia Nobel

Annraoi de Paor was born 5 Aug in Waterford, and was educated in electrical engineering at UCD and at Berkeley. He spent most of his career at UCD where much of his research was of a mathematical nature. He has made notable contributions to rehabilitation engineering, and recently published the book An Illustrated Collection of Limericks for Engineers and Physicists.

Links: UCD Book

Eugene Gath was born 10 Mar in Dublin, grew up in Waterford and was educated at UCD, where he won an NUI Travelling Studentship Prize, and at MIT. His 1989 PhD on "Exact Results in Quantum Field Theory: The Spinor Lehmann Representation in Anti-de Sitter Space and the Superconformal Thirring Ghosts" was done with Dan Freedman. Most of his career has been spent at UL, where his original focus on relativity, conformal field theory and string theory has given way to applications of mathematics and statistics, especially financial mathematics.

Link: UL

Theoretical physicist Ciaran Ryan (1934-1973) was born in Westmeath and brought up in Longford. He was educated at Maynooth and the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. A priest too, he taught at the University of Rochester and at UCD, and authored one book. He died young in a mountaineering accident near Geneva.

Links: IMS Web

Theoretical physicist Dermott McCrea (1934-1993) was born 25 Apr in Athlone, Westmeath. He was educated at UCG, Louvain, and the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. His 1965 PhD on "Gravitational Radiation" was done with John Synge. He also became a Franciscan priest. Most of his career was spent at UCD, where he developed EXCALC, an early computer algebra system for doing calculations in quantum theory and relativity.

Links: Obit Medal Book EXCALC

Paddy Barry was born 20 Oct in Ballynacargy, Westmeath, grew up in Glenville and Mallow, Cork. He was educated at UCC and the University of London, earning his 1960 PhD on "The Minimum Modulus of Integral Functions of Small Order" with Walter Hayman. He worked at UCC for four decades, and is well-known for his 2001 book Geometry with Trigonometry.

Lambert Hughes (1698-1771) was born in Wexford, and was educated at TCD. There he served as Donegall Lecturer of mathematics, but in midlife was expelled from the college over a scandal. He spent the last three decades of his life as a clergyman, and served as chancellor of Christ Church.

Links: TCD 1 TCD 2 Christ Church

Bartholomew Lloyd (1772-1837) was born 5 Feb in New Ross, Wexford. He was educated at TCD, where he then spent his entire career, implementing radical changes in the methods of teaching mathematics. In particular he introduced calculus to the curriculum. He held chairs in maths and physics, and later in Greek and divinity, became provost, and wrote several books.

Links: Wikipedia TCD 1 TCD 2

Arthur Conway (1875-1950) was born 2 Oct in Wexford town and was educated at UCD. He also studied at Oxford, before spending half a century on the staff at UCD, rising to the rank of president. He had a great passion for quaternions, authored one of the very first books on relativity, and co-edited two volumes of the collected papers of Hamilton.

Links: MathSciNet MacTutor Wikipedia UCD

Colm Barry (1906-1976) was born 29 Nov in Enniscorthy, Wexford, and was educated at UCD. He worked as a statistician in the department of industry and commerce, and his family recalls Brian Lenihan describing him as "the most brilliant civil servant of his generation".

Links: Paper Geni

Astronomer Mervyn Ellison (1909-1963) was born 5 May in Fethard-on-Sea, Wexford, and grew up there and in Armagh. He was educated at TCD, and then taught in schools and worked for the UK admiralty. However, most of his career was spent at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh and at Dunsink (and the DIAS).

Links: Wikipedia Bio Ency Astro Obit

John de Courcy Short (1916-1942) was born in Wexford town, and was educated at TCD, where he was a Scholar in mathematics. He died a few years later, a wartime victim of a German U-boat.

Links: Death Cricket

Applied mathematician Cecil Graham (1939-2003) was born 25 Feb in Wells, Wexford, and educated at TCD (where he was a Scholar in maths), Brown, and Glasgow. His research area was viscoelasticity, and most of his career was spent at Simon Fraser University. He had several PhD students and three books to his name. He was very active in the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society, and they named their doctoral dissertation award after him.

Links: MGP MathSciNet Obit Obit2 Award

Meteorologist Ray Bates was born in Kilmore Quay, Wexford, and was educated at UCD and MIT. After many years in the Met service, he worked at Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Copenhagen, and UCD.

Links: MGP Web

Dennis McLaughlin was born in Gorey, Wexford, and was educated at UCD and Brown. After a spell as a mathematics and quantitative finance professor at Princeton, he moved into global risk management. He is now group chief risk officer for LCH.Clearnet in London.

Link: Web

Statistician Catherine Comiskey was born 16 Nov in Dublin, and grew up in New Ross, Wexford. She was educated at TCD and DCU. She taught at ITT Dublin and Maynooth, and now heads up TCD's School of Nursing & Midwifery. She has supervised numerous doctorates in biomathematics and statistical epidemiology.

Link: MGP MathSciNet TCD

Astronomer David Hobbs was born 31 Jan in Gorey, Wexford, and was educated at IT Carlow, the University of Essex and TCD. His career has been spent mostly at Vienna, TERMA (Denmark), and then Lund Observatory. His research interests are in space astrometry.

Links: Advisor Lund

Bernard Mulligan was born in Wexford town, and was educated entirely at TCD.

Link:

Sinead Breen was born 29 Jul in Wexford town, and was educated at DCU. She taught at Maynooth before moving to St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, where she has lectured in maths and carried out research in maths education, work she continues at DCU.

Links: MGP MathSciNet DCU

Applied mathematician Justin McGuinness was born in Wexford town, and educated at UCC, where he recently completed his PhD on the hydrodynamic behaviour of arrays of wave power devices. He now lectures at CIT.

Link:

Oliver Byrne (1810-1880) was born 31 Jul in Avoca, Wicklow. He started publishing in Dublin at age 20, but spent most of the rest of his life in England and the USA. He is remembered for a book giving an innovative coloured treatment of Euclid.

Links: Wikipedia MacTutor Convergence

Maurice OReilly was born 3 Oct in Dublin, raised in Wicklow, and educated at TCD. He has taught at Dundalk IT, in Dar es Salaam, and at St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra. Over the years his interests have turned from numerical analysis to mathematics education.

Link: SPD

Pauline Mellon was born on 2 Aug in Avoca, Wicklow, and was educated at UCD, where she has spent most of her career. Her research interests straddle complex analysis, functional analysis and differential geometry: she studies manifolds with symmetry.

Link: UCD

Dara Ó Briain was born 4 Feb in Bray, Wicklow, and studied maths and physics at UCD before embarking on a successful career in comedy. His TV work in the UK includes School of Hard Sums with Marcus de Sautoy.

Links: Wikipedia School of Hard Sums