Irish Swedish Mathematical Connections: November 2025
In previous blogs here, we have surveyed Irish mathematical connections with France (July 2019), Austria (Jan 2021), Switzerland (Jan 2022), Holland (Jul 2022), Poland (Jan 2023), and Norway (Nov 2023). This month, we turn our attention to Sweden.
Our goal is to include all mathematical people whose training and/or careers included time in both Ireland and Sweden. In addition to Irish and Swedish people, we feature some from elsewhere who, for instance, did a PhD in one country and found employment in the other.
South Sweden (where most of the universities are)
The visible Irish/Swedish mathematical overlap appears to be recent and small. The 1962 ICM took place in Stockholm, and several Irish mathematicians participated in that, as documented in detail at our associated blog from 2018. We repeat some of that accounting now. Short communications were given by 8 people of interest to us in an Irish context, half of those being new to these congresses.
As usual below, we include some people with physics and engineering leanings who had mathematical training. Please alert us to any omissions or errors.
Last updated 25 May 2026.
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01. Applied mathematician and engineer Bertram Broberg (1925-2005) was born 4 Feb in Balingsta, west of Uppsala, and first qualified as a civil engineer at KHT (Stockholm) in 1949, earning his doctorate there in 1956 on "Shock Waves in Elastic and Elastic-Plastic Media" under Waloddi Weibull. His research spanned solid mechanics to biomechanics. Most of his career was spent at Lund Institute (later Univ) of Technology. Following official retirement, he moved to UCD in 1991, where he continued to publish and authored the book Cracks and Fractures (1999). |
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02. George Hall (1925-2018) was born 5 May in Belfast, and was educated at QUB (BSc 1946) and Cambridge (PhD 1950+). His thesis on "Contributions to the Theory of Chemical Valency", in which he introduced the self-consistent field (SCF) method and what are now known as the Roothaan-Hall equations. was done under John Lennard-Jones. His career was spent at Cambridge (1950-1955), Imperial College (1955-1962), Uppsala (1958-1959), and Nottingham (1962-1982). He then worked at Kyoto Univ (1983-1988), before returning to Nottingham. He had 13 PhD students. Much of his research was in quantum chemistry, and he authored the books Matrices and Tensors (1963), Applied Group Theory (1965), and Molecular Solid State Physics (1991). He was awarded honorary degrees by Kyoto (1989), Maynooth (2004) and Cambridge. Wikipedia / Bio / Quanum Chem / Obit |
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03. Biostatistician Marie Reilly was born 15 March in Multifarnham, Weatmeath. She earned physics (BSc 1975) and stats (MSc 1977) degrees at UCG, and then taught at Bolton St and Kevin St and at the Medical Lab Training Project in Lesotho. Her 1991 PhD on "Semi-parametric Methods of Dealing with Missing or Surrogate Covariate Data" was done under Cork's Margaret O'Sullivan Pepe at the University of Washington in Seattle. After spells at UCD and UCC, she settled at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, where she supervised several PhDs. |
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04. Maciej Klimek was born 13 July in Krakow, Poland, and was educated there at Jagiellonian Univ (MSc 1978, PhD 1981). His thesis on "Extremal Functions and L-regularity of Sets in |
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05. Biostatistician Yudi Pawitan was born born in Rain, Indonesia, and was educated at first at Institut Pertanian Bogor (BSc 1982). Following his 1987 PhD on "Estimation of Spectral Components and Deconvolution of Time Series" at UC Davis under Bob Shumway, he was 4 years at the Univ of Washington in Seattle. He spent a decade in Ireland--UCD (1991-1999) and UCC (1999-2001)--where he supervised 3 PhDs, and the rest of his career at Karolinska Inst. His books include Philosophies, Puzzles and Paradoxes: A Statistician’s Search for Truth (2024). |
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06. Michael Vynnycky was born 13 Mar in London, and was educated at Oxford (BA 1986, DPhil 1991), his thesis on "Mathematical Modelling of the Heat and Mass Transfer in Welding Processes" being done with Andrew Fowler. After a stint at Tohoku Nat Industrial Research Inst in Sendai, Japan (1992-1996), his time has been split between KTH Stockholm (1997-2007, 2014-2018) and Limerick (2008-2014, 2019- ). He has supervised numerous PhD students, 9 of them at Limerick, and co-authored the book Introduction to Perturbation Methods (2022). |
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07. Astronomer David Hobbs was born 31 January in Gorey, Wexford, and was educated at IT Carlow & the University of Essex (BSc 1991) and TCD (PhD 1995). His thesis on "Novel Techniques for Calculating Electronic and Optical Properties of Solids" was done under Denis Weaire. His career started at Captec, Dublin (1995-1998), Univ Vienna (1998-2000), and TERMA, Denmark (2001-2006). Since 2007 he has been at Lund Observatory in Sweden. His research interests are in space astrometry. |
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08. Emil Sköldberg was born in Sweden and was educated at Uppsala (1992) and Stolkholm (PhD 1997). His thesis on "Co)homology of Monomial Algebras" was done under Jörgen Backelin & Ralf Fröberg. His career started in Gävle Univ (north of Uppsala, 1997-1998) and back at Stockholm (1998-2002), whereupon he settled at Galway. He has had 4 PhD students. aa / bb / cc
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09. Peter Hegarty was born in Douglas, Cork, and was educated at UCC (BSc 1993, MSc 1994) and at Princeton (PhD 1998). His thesis "On Eisenstein Series for Orthogonal Groups" was done under Goro Shimura & Peter Sarnak. His entire career has been spent at Chalmers U Tech (Gothenburg). He has supervised 3 PhDs. His interests are in discrete probability, combinatorial number theory and finite group theory. |
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10. Michael Melgaard was born in Aalborg, Denmark, and was educated entirely there (BSc 1993, MSc 1994, PhD 1999). His thesis on "Quantum Scattering Near Thresholds" was done with Arne Jensen. His career started at Chalmers (2003-2003), Uppsala U (2003-2008) and DIT (2008-2012). Since then he has been at the Univ of Sussex. |
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11. Rubina Kotak was born in France and was educated at Strasbourg (1996) and Canterbury (1997) and Lund (PhD 2003). Her thesis on "Inside Pulsating White Dwarfs: Clues From Time-resolved Spectroscopy" was done with Marten Kerkwijk & Lennart Lindegren. Her career so far has been at QUB, where she has supervised 4 PhDs. |
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12. Petri Piiroinen was borrn in Sweden and was educated at Stockholm (1998, PhD 2002). His thesis on "Recurrent Dynamics of Nonsmooth Systems with Application to Human Gait" was done under Harry Dankowicz. His career started at Bristol (2003-2006) and at Galway (2007-2020), where he had 3 PhD students. Since 2020, he has been at Chalmers U (Gothenburg). His research focusses on numerical methods and analysis of nonsmooth dynamical systems associated with impacts and friction between rigid bodies. Chalmers / |
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13. Neil B. Dobbs was born 26 January in Waterford city and was educated at TCD (BA 2001) and Paris (PhD 2006+). His theseis on "Critical Points, Cusps and Induced Expansion in Dimension One" was done under Jacek Graczyk. His career so far has included positions in IMPAN Warsaw (2007-2008), Stockholm (2008-2010), IBM New York (2010-2012), Helsinki (2012-2014) and Geneva. Since 2017, he has been at UCD, where his interests include measure-theoretical behaviour of chaotic dynamical systems and the geometric properties of Julia sets. |
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14. Anthony Metcalfe was born in Tipperary and was educated at first at TCD (BA 2003?, MSc by thesis under Ken Duffy 2004). His PhD on "Structural and Universality Properties of Gelfand-Tsetlin Patterns and Their Generalizations" was done at UCC under Neil O'Connell. His career has been spent at Uppsala. |
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15. Klara Stokes was born in Sweden and was educated at Barcelona (2008), Tarragona (2009, PhD 2010). Her thesis on "Combinatorial Structures For Anonymous Database Search" was done with Maria Bras-Amorós. After some postdocs in Catalunya and Sweden, she was at Maynooth 2016-2020. Since then she has been at Umeå Univ. Her interests are in incidence geometry from a combinatorial and geometric point of view.
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16. Robin Karlsson was born in Sweden and was educated at Chalmers (2018) and TCD (PhD 2022). His thesis on "" was done under Andrei Parnachev. His interests include black holes and quantum gravity. |
