The Academy is thrilled to be partnering with Ibec for the sixth year in a row to deliver our annual Hamilton Day celebration. Hamilton Day takes place each year on 16 October and commemorates a ground-breaking discovery by one of Ireland’s most famous scientists, William Rowan Hamilton. Learn more about this true eureka moment for science. As part of its annual Hamilton Day celebrations the Royal Irish Academy awards the Hamilton Prize in Mathematics to the top undergraduate mathematics students in the country and hosts the Hamilton Lecture, a public lecture delivered by a world-renowned mathematician or theoretical physicist. The prizewinning students also take part in a masterclass with the Hamilton Speaker.

This year’s Hamilton Speaker, Kip Thorne, is the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). From 1967 to 2009, he led a Caltech research group working in relativistic astrophysics and gravitational physics, with emphasis on relativistic stars, black holes, and especially gravitational waves. Kip cofounded (with Rainer Weiss and Ronald Drever) the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) Project. LIGO – in the hands of a younger generation of physicists – made the breakthrough discovery of gravitational waves arriving at Earth from the distant universe on September 14, 2015. For his contributions to LIGO and to gravitational wave research, Kip shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, and other major awards. He continues to do scientific research and scientific consulting, a notable example of which was for the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar.