What Have the Irish Ever Done for Mathematics?

On Thu, 27 Aug 2026, Colm Mulcahy spoke at the Irish Mathematical Society's 50th anniversary conference. at Trinity College Dublin, on Irish contributions to maths over the past 4 centuries.  His slides are here.  

See also the fun Irish Maths quiz here, which was circulated at that meeting.  [Hint: you will know when you get all the right answers!]

On 17 Sep 2026, this presentation was discussed in an article in the Irish Times, as well as in the associated That's Maths blog, both by Peter Lynch.   

The slides linked above provided prompts for the verbal presentation, which covered a lot more context and detail.

Colm had a lot to say about the specific contributions of many Irish men and women, and drew attention to Irish connections to the arrow notation for limits, Napoleon's Theorem, and the TCD degrees of Kirkman and Sylvester.  He addressed the tricky question of identifying "the first" Irish woman with a doctorate in maths. 

He highlighted some people for whom photographs had only just been located that month (for instance Victor Meally, Henry Sandham and Marjorie Long), little realising that Sandham featured in the first article in the just-released Summer 2026 issue of the Bulletin of the IMS.