The Simons Foundation has announced they will give the Hamilton’s Mathematics Institute (HMI) a grant of $600,000 today.
This is the second grant that the Simons Foundation has offered to Trinity. The first, of the same amount, was awarded in 2016.
This grant will go towards extending and developing the Simons Visiting Professors, Simons Postdoctoral Fellows, and Simons Visiting Scholars programmes. Furthermore, it will fund the creation of an annual Simons Graduate School and a Simons Symposia.
A conference, hosted by HMI, took place on September 27th, where the grant was announced. This symposium was dedicated to the previous chair of the symposium until 2015, Sir Michael Atiyah, who passed away in January of this year.
The Simons Foundation is currently undertaking a programme which awards grants to many centres of excellence in mathematics and general sciences internationally, called ‘Targeted Grants to Institutes’. Trinity, as one of these centres, will be internationally supported and will be able to strengthen their contacts within the scientific community worldwide.
The Simons Foundation is a US private foundation that funds research. Their mission, as stated on their website, is to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences, and it supports discovery-driven scientific research in institutes.
The HMI was founded in Trinity in 2005 on the 200 years after the birth of Ireland’s greatest mathematician, William Rowan Hamilton. The aim of the HMI is to “foster and support the economic, cultural, and societal benefits of mathematics and fundamental science as drivers of progress in Ireland”. The institute works closely with the Trinity School of Mathematics.
Samson Shatashvili, the Director of the HMI and a Trinity Professor of Natural Philosophy, announced the award at a Advisory Board meeting, stating: “This continued support from the Simons Foundation to the HMI will provide significant energy to the institute and allow us to extend our national and international role by building on the many strengths that already exist, and by stimulating and nurturing mathematics research with renewed vigour.”
Shatashvili continued: “It will build on the HMI’s success in creating the conditions for greater collaboration and the exchange of ideas and expertise through visits by leading international mathematicians and theoretical physicists to Ireland and associated workshops, seminars, and conferences crucial to maintaining the central role of mathematics in today’s world.”
