Members past and present
Well known Members of the Academy have included: James Gandon, architect; Henry Grattan, politician; William Rowan Hamilton, world-renowned mathematician: Francis Beaufort, hydrographer and originator of the Beaufort Wind Scale; Eoin MacNeill, politician and historian; William Wilde, polymath and father of the playwright, Oscar; Walter Heitler, physicist; Frank Mitchell, natural historian; William Hunter McCrea, astronomer; Seán Lemass, Taoiseach 1959–66; Cearbhall Ó’Dálaigh, Attorney General 1946–8, 1951–3 and President of Ireland 1974–6; Frederick Boland, diplomat; J.P. Beddy, public servant; Arthur Cox, solicitor; F.S.L. Lyons, historian; Michael Morris, 3rd Baron Killanin and President of the International Olympic Committee; Eamon de Valera, Taoiseach 1932–48; 1951–4; 1957–9 and President of Ireland 1959–73.
Honorary Members of the Academy have included: Edmund Burke (1790); Johann van Goethe (1825); Mary Somerville (1834); Caroline Herschel (1837); Maria Edgeworth (1842); William Wordsworth (1846); Charles Darwin (1866); Henry Longfellow (1873); Louis Pasteur (1878); William Kelvin (1878); Joseph Lister (1886); Dmitry Mendeléyev (1889); Jacobus Henricus Van't Hoff, Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1901); Ivan Pavlov, Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (1904); Ernest Rutherford, Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1908); Johannes Diderik van der Waals, Nobel Prize for Physics (1910); Richard Willstätter, Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1915); Max Planck, Nobel Prize for Physics (1918); Albert Einstein, Nobel Prize for Physics (1921); Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize for Physics (1922); Werner Heisenberg, Nobel Prize for Physics (1932); Erwin Schrödinger, Nobel Prize for Physics (1933); Enrico Fermi, Nobel Prize for Physics (1938); Max Born, Nobel Prize for Physics (1954); Melvin Calvin, Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1961); Dorothy Hodgkin, Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1964); Alan Hodgkin, Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (1963)
