41 Irish mathematicians

Robert Adrain was an Irish mathematician, whose career was spent in the USA. He was considered one of the most brilliant mathematical minds of the time in America, during a period when few academics conducted original research. He is chiefly remembered for his formulation of the method of least squares.

Conel Hugh O'Donel Alexander, known as Hugh Alexander and C. H. O'D. Alexander as a pen name, was an Irish-born British cryptanalyst, chess player, and chess writer. He worked on the German Enigma machine at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, and was later the head of the cryptanalysis division at GCHQ for 25 years. In chess, he was twice British chess champion and earned the title of International Master.

Patrick d'Arcy was an Irish mathematician born in Kiltullagh, County Galway in the west of Ireland. His family, who were Catholics, suffered under the penal laws. In 1739 d'Arcy was sent abroad by his parents to an uncle in Paris. He was tutored in mathematics by Jean-Baptiste Clairaut, and became a friend of Jean-Baptiste's son, Alexis-Claude Clairaut,, who was a brilliant young mathematician. d'Arcy made original contributions to dynamics. He is best known for his part in the discovery of the principle of angular momentum, in a form which was known as "the principle of areas," which he announced in 1746. See the article on areal velocity. d'Arcy also had an illustrious military career in the French army. He obtained the title of "Count" in the French nobility. He was a generous patron of Irish refugees in France. In addition to his contributions to dynamics, he performed research on artillery and on electricity.

St. George Ashe, D.D. was an Irish mathematician and university administrator who, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, served as Church of Ireland Bishop of Cloyne, Clogher and Derry, in succession. From 1657 to 1718 he was the Donegall Lecturer in Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). He is remembered now chiefly for his alleged role in performing a secret marriage between Jonathan Swift and Esther Johnson (Stella).

James Bryce LLD FRSE was an Irish mathematician, naturalist and geologist.

Oliver Byrne was a civil engineer and prolific author of works on subjects including mathematics, geometry, and engineering. He is best known for his 'coloured' book of Euclid's Elements. He was also a large contributor to Spon's Dictionary of Engineering.

John Edward Campbell was a mathematician, best known for his contribution to the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula.

John Casey was a respected Irish geometer. He is most famous for Casey's theorem on a circle that is tangent to four other circles, an extension of Ptolemy's theorem. However, he contributed several novel proofs and perspectives on Euclidean geometry. He and Émile Lemoine are considered to be the co-founders of the modern geometry of the circle and the triangle.

David Conlon is an Irish mathematician who is currently a Professor of Mathematics at Caltech. He represented Ireland in the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1998 and 1999. He was an undergraduate in Trinity College Dublin, where he was elected a Scholar in 2001 and graduated in 2003. He earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 2009. In 2019 he moved to Caltech, having been a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford and Professor of Discrete Mathematics in the Mathematics Institute at the University of Oxford. His research interests are in Hungarian-style combinatorics, particularly Ramsey theory, extremal graph theory, combinatorial number theory, and probabilistic methods in combinatorics.

Dr. John B. Cosgrave is an Irish mathematician specialising in number theory. Educated at Royal Holloway College, London, he lectured in Carysfort College and St Patrick's College of Education (Drumcondra).

Kevin Joseph Costello FRS is an Irish mathematician, since 2014 the Krembil Foundation's William Rowan Hamilton chair of theoretical physics at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

George Darley (1795–1846) was an Irish poet, novelist, literary critic, and author of mathematical texts.

Éamon de Valera was a prominent statesman and political leader in 20th-century Ireland, serving several terms as head of government and head of state, with a prominent role introducing the Constitution of Ireland.

Charles Graves was an Irish mathematician, academic, and clergyman. He was Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin (1843–1862), and was president of the Royal Irish Academy (1861–1866). He served as dean of the Chapel Royal at Dublin Castle, and later as Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert and Aghadoe. He was the brother of both the jurist and mathematician John Graves, and the writer and clergyman Robert Perceval Graves.

Hugh Hamilton was a mathematician, natural philosopher (scientist) and professor at Trinity College Dublin, and later a Church of Ireland bishop, Bishop of Clonfert and Kilmacduagh, and then Bishop of Ossory.

Sir William Rowan Hamilton MRIA was an Irish mathematician, Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin, and Royal Astronomer of Ireland. He worked in both pure mathematics and mathematics for physics. He made important contributions to optics, classical mechanics and algebra. Although Hamilton was not a physicist–he regarded himself as a pure mathematician–his work was of major importance to physics, particularly his reformulation of Newtonian mechanics, now called Hamiltonian mechanics. This work has proven central to the modern study of classical field theories such as electromagnetism, and to the development of quantum mechanics. In pure mathematics, he is best known as the inventor of quaternions.

Sir Andrew Searle Hart (1811–1890) was an Anglo-Irish mathematician and Vice-Provost of Trinity College Dublin (TCD).

Samuel Haughton was an Irish scientific writer.

Alexander Johnson was an Irish mathematician and academic.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, was a British mathematical physicist and engineer born in Belfast. Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow for 53 years, he did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging discipline of physics in its modern form. He received the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1883, was its President 1890–1895, and in 1892 was the first British scientist to be elevated to the House of Lords.

Cornelius (Cornel) Lanczos was a Hungarian mathematician and physicist, who was born in Székesfehérvár, Fejér County, Kingdom of Hungary on February 2, 1893, and died on June 25, 1974. According to György Marx he was one of The Martians.

John Trevor Lewis was a Welsh mathematical physicist who made contributions to areas including quantum measurement, Bose–Einstein condensation and large deviations theory. He was a senior professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) in Ireland from 1972, serving as the Director of the School of Theoretical Physics from 1975 until his retirement in 2001. He also founded the Communications Networks Research Institute at Dublin Institute of Technology.

Peter Lynch is an Irish meteorologist, mathematician, blogger and book author. His interests include numerical weather prediction, dynamic meteorology, Hamiltonian mechanics, the history of meteorology, and the popularisation of mathematics.

James MacCullagh was an Irish mathematician.

Richard MacDonnell LL.D., D.D., S.F.T.C.D. (1787–1867) was an Irish cleric and academic, who became was the Reformist 29th Provost of Trinity College Dublin. He was also the projector of Sorrento Terrace, Dalkey, today known as the most expensive row of houses in Ireland.

Desmond "Des" MacHale is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at University College Cork, Ireland. He is an author and speaker on several subjects, including George Boole, lateral thinking puzzles, and humour.

William Magee was an Irish academic and Church of Ireland clergyman. He taught at Trinity College Dublin, serving as Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics (1800–1811), was Bishop of Raphoe (1819–1822) and then Archbishop of Dublin until his death.

Annie Scott Dill Maunder was an Irish-British astronomer.

Thomas Meredith FTCD (1777–1819) was an Anglo-Irish clergyman, Doctor of Divinity, Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, and a distinguished mathematician who gave his findings before the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. He is best remembered for his association with the poet Charles Wolfe and as the subject of a ghost story related in True Irish Ghost Stories and Memorials to the Dead.

Gerard J. Murphy MRIA was a prolific Irish mathematician. His textbooks are internationally acclaimed, and translated into different languages. He died from cancer in October 2006, at the age of 57.

Robert Murphy FRS was an Irish mathematician and physicist who made contributions to algebra.

Richard Murray (1725?–1799) was an Irish mathematician and academic, who spent his whole career Trinity College Dublin (TCD), serving both as Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics (1764-1795) and Provost (1795-1799).

Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin [ˈiːvʲɪnʲ nʲiː ˈhuːlʲəwaːnʲ] is an Irish academic, broadcaster and musician. She is also a past winner of the Rose of Tralee contest.

Matthew O'Brien (1814–1855) was an Irish mathematician.

William McFadden Orr, FRS was a British and Irish mathematician.

Rev Prof George Salmon DD FBA FRS FRSE LLD was a distinguished and influential Irish mathematician and Anglican theologian. After working in algebraic geometry for two decades, Salmon devoted the last forty years of his life to theology. His entire career was spent at Trinity College Dublin.

Samson Lulievich Shatashvili is a theoretical and mathematical physicist who has been working at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, since 2002. He holds the Trinity College Dublin Chair of Natural Philosophy and is the director of the Hamilton Mathematics Institute.. He is also affiliated with the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS), where he held the Louis Michel Chair from 2003 to 2013 and currently holds the Israel Gelfand Chair. Prior to moving to Trinity College, he was a professor of physics at Yale University from 1994.

Sir George Gabriel Stokes, 1st Baronet, was an Anglo-Irish physicist and mathematician. Born in County Sligo, Ireland, Stokes spent all of his career at the University of Cambridge, where he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1849 until his death in 1903. As a physicist, Stokes made seminal contributions to fluid mechanics, including the Navier–Stokes equations and to physical optics, with notable works on polarization and fluorescence. As a mathematician, he popularised "Stokes' theorem" in vector calculus and contributed to the theory of asymptotic expansions. Stokes, along with Felix Hoppe-Seyler, first demonstrated the oxygen transport function of hemoglobin and showed color changes produced by aeration of hemoglobin solutions.

James Thomson was an Irish mathematician, notable for his role in the formation of the thermodynamics school at Glasgow University. He was the father of the engineer and physicist James Thomson and the physicist Lord Kelvin.

Vergilius of Salzburg was an Irish churchman and early astronomer. Around 745, he left Ireland, intending to visit the Holy Land; but, like many of his countrymen, who seemed to have adopted this practice as a work of piety, he settled in France. Vergilius served as abbot of Aghaboe, bishop of Ossory and later, bishop of Salzburg. He was called "the Apostle of Carinthia" and "the geometer".

Timothy Trevor West was an Irish academic and politician.