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.

The Royal Irish Academy is pleased to announce that the 2026 Hamilton Lecture will be delivered by Fields Medallist Professor James Maynard.

About the lecture

Prime numbers are some of the most fascinating objects in mathematics. On the one hand they are basic and fundamental and are vital for modern internet security. On the other hand, they remain mysterious and poorly understood – despite being studied for thousands of years! In this year’s Hamilton Lecture, Professor James Maynard, will explain why prime numbers are vital, both in pure mathematics and in the real world, and how current mathematics is able to make progress on some of the key questions which have occupied mathematicians going back to the ancient Greeks.

About the Speaker

James Maynard is Professor of Number Theory at the Mathematical Institute in Oxford. He was an undergraduate in Cambridge, did his DPhil in Oxford, and has done postdoctoral work in Montreal, Berkeley, Princeton and Oxford before joining the faculty at the Mathematical Institute in Oxford. Professor Maynard was awarded the prestigious Fields Medal in 2022, the highest honour a young mathematician can attain and especially hard to win as the medals are only awarded every four years to mathematicians under the age of forty. James’s main research interest is in analytic number theory, particularly the distribution of prime numbers. In his research he uses a blend of ideas from analysis, combinatorics and algebra to try to answer old questions in number theory.

Book your ticket here.