William Rowan Hamilton is famous for discovering conical refraction and quaternions. He is probably the greatest Irish mathematical physicist ever. However, behind this brilliant academic figure is a man who fell miserably in love but was left with a broken heart. He struggled with alcoholism, once attempted suicide and wrote poetry. He was obsessed with his work and in a flash of genius carved an equation for quaternions in a stone at Broom Bridge.
The story will be presented by Prof. Iggy McGovern, a physicist and poet. He is the author of a sonnet sequence entitled ‘A Mystic Dream of 4’. To complement the lecture 12 fabulous readers will read some of Iggy’s poems from the sequence.
The readers are:
Eric Finch
Jean Finch
James Lunney
Linde Lunney
Brian Espey
Louise Bradley
Byrne Hacking
Katarzyna Siewierska
Danny Bennett
Joanna Siewierska
Josh McMahon
Jessica Weitbrecht
Dublin University Physics Society 