Attending the inaugural meeting of the Irish Mathematical Society (IMS) at Trinity College Dublin in 1976, I never dreamt I would be present at the annual meeting last month when the society, now with more than 300 members, celebrated its golden jubilee, also held in Trinity College.
The IMS was established to promote mathematics and mathematical research in Ireland, by arranging and supporting conferences, awarding students and publishing a bulletin twice each year. The majority of society members work at Irish universities and other third-level institutes.
Among the highlights of the jubilee meeting was a lecture by Colm Mulcahy, professor emeritus at Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia. Mulcahy studied mathematics at University College Dublin and then at Cornell University, where he achieved his PhD in algebra.
He is well known in mathematics outreach circles, and is an active and enthusiastic supporter of Maths Week in Ireland. He is also internationally recognised as an expert on mathematical card tricks, and has published a book on the topic.
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The establishment of the Annals of Irish Mathematics and Mathematicians (AIMM) was initiated by Mulcahy in December 2014, originally aiming to track all Irish students who earned advanced mathematics degrees.
We are familiar with the term ‘quaternion’, even if we would not recognise a quaternion materialising before our eyes.
The objectives of AIMM are to foster a deeper knowledge and appreciation of Irish mathematics and mathematical sciences, both in academic circles and among the general public, to assemble information about Irish mathematicians over the past several centuries, and to provide a dynamic electronic archive of Irish mathematics and mathematicians, openly available to current and future researchers.
“What have the Irish ever done for mathematics?” That was the title Mulcahy chose for his talk, and the comprehensive answer may come as a surprise. Many of us have heard of William Rowan Hamilton, but numerous other people with or without Irish connections have also made major contributions: George Berkeley, George Boole, George Stokes, George FitzGerald – and thousands more not called George.
We are familiar with the term “quaternion”, even if we would not recognise a quaternion materialising before our eyes. The amazing thing about Hamilton’s quaternions is that they do not commute. We know that order matters: try putting your shoes on before your socks. We see this non-commutative behaviour with rotations, and quaternions are now invaluable in navigation, to calculate the trajectory and attitude of spacecraft.
Among Hamilton’s many other accomplishments are his brilliant reformulation of mechanics, in which he represented a dynamical system by a single mathematical function now called the Hamiltonian, and depicted the motion in a multidimensional arena called phase space.
The influence of Irish mathematical science is wide, and Irish scholars have driven research at some of the world’s leading centres in Europe, the US and elsewhere
This formalism proved, many decades later, to be an ideal framework for quantum mechanics – fundamental for physics at atomic scales.
The influence of Irish mathematical science is wide, and Irish scholars have driven research at some of the world’s leading centres in Europe, the US and elsewhere. AIMM documents more than 5,000 notable mathematical people who are Irish, worked in Ireland, or had Irish doctoral advisers.
Mulcahy continues to develop and expand AIMM, which has become a substantial and invaluable resource on Irish mathematics. The database includes several special sections documenting the geographical origins of Irish mathematicians, books by and about Irish mathematicians, and the contributions of women to maths in Ireland. If you click the Blog link at mathsireland.ie, you will find close to a hundred posts on numerous aspects of mathematics with an Irish connection.
Peter Lynch is emeritus professor at the School of Mathematics & Statistics, University College Dublin. He blogs at thatsmaths.com.
