Hamilton Day 2021 Review

Hamilton Lecture: 'Glimpses into Hyperbolic Geometry'.

It is some two hundred years since the discovery of non-Euclidean or hyperbolic geometry; geometry in which the angles in a triangle sum to less than two right angles. Hyperbolic geometry has seen great flowering in the last forty years, bringing it right into the mainstream of mathematics. The lecture offered some glimpses into these developments, in particular some astonishingly beautiful computer graphics.

In a Q&A session moderated by Professor Martin Mathieu, QUB, Series responded to questions from Ireland’s top mathematicians and members of the public. This first ever hybrid Hamilton Lecture was attended by invited guests (due to Covid restrictions) and online by people from all over Ireland and around the world.

Professor Caroline Series

Caroline Series FRS is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick.

Following her first degree at Somerville College, Oxford, Caroline won a Kennedy Scholarship to Harvard University in the USA where she did a doctorate in mathematics. Returning to England, she held a position at Warwick from 1978 until her retirement in 2016. She now lives in Herefordshire but remains actively involved in mathematics.

Caroline’s early research was about the connections between the geometry of hyperbolic surfaces and chaotic motion. Her more recent work is largely about the geometry of three-dimensional hyperbolic manifolds and their associated fractal limit sets: one can get a taste from her book Indra's Pearls, co-authored by David Mumford and David Wright, published by Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Caroline has served the mathematical community on many committees both national and international and has also given many distinguished public lectures. She is known for making her research, and that of others, accessible to non-experts. Throughout her career she has taken a leading role in encouraging women mathematicians and in 2014 was the first vice-chair of the International Mathematical Union’s Committee for Women in Mathematics.

Her work has been recognised by numerous awards and in 2016 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. She was President of the London Mathematical Society 2017-19 and in 2021 was awarded the LMS-IMA Crighton Medal in recognition both of her mathematical work and her outstanding service to the mathematical community.

Hamilton Prize

The top nine undergraduate mathematics students in Ireland were awarded the prestigious Hamilton Prize in a ceremony hosted by the President of the Royal Irish Academy, Mary Canning, to mark Hamilton Day.

Masterclass and In Conversation

In this informal discussion, Series shared her own experiences and opinions with the Hamilton Prize winners from universities all around the island of Ireland.

An 'In Conversation' followed the Hamilton Masterclass, moderated by  STEM education expert and science broadcaster, Dr Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin. 

Hamilton Day is proudly sponsored by Ibec and supported by The Irish Times