Trinity student wins 2018 Hamilton Prize
Posted on: 18 October 2018
Trinity student, Ronan O’Gorman, was earlier this week honoured as one of Ireland’s brightest young mathematicians when he received the 2018 Hamilton Prize along with eight of his peers (one from each of Ireland’s universities).
Hamilton Day celebrations included the award ceremony that honoured the top nine undergraduate mathematics students in Ireland with the Hamilton Prize in mathematics. The ceremony took place at Academy House and was attended by family and friends of the recipients, as well as representatives from their university departments and members of the mathematics community in Ireland.
As every year, the Royal Irish Academy celebrated the anniversary of Trinity alumnus, William Rowan Hamilton, whose discovery of quaternion algebra was made on 16th October 1843. Hamilton Day 2018 began with a masterclass for students and early career researchers in mathematics, given by this year’s Hamilton speaker, Professor Martin Hairer from Imperial College London. The masterclass was hosted by ARUP, sponsor of Hamilton Day.
Professor Hairer is a leading scientist in the field of probability theory and has advanced the field of stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) by providing a toolkit for addressing what were previously categorized as inaccessible problems. Martin’s work is also furthering the more general areas of stochastic analysis — a part of mathematics concerned with random processes — and stochastic dynamics.
In his Hamilton lecture, Martin discussed mathematical objects arising naturally in probability theory, as well as some of their surprising properties. In particular, he showed how one of these objects was involved in the confirmation of the existence of atoms over 100 years ago and how new properties of related objects are still being discovered today.