The ascendancy of mathematics: Mathematics and Irish society from Cromwell to the Celtic Tiger

Throughout modern Irish history science and politics have been closely connected. English colonizers first brought science to Ireland in the seventeenth century, and for nearly two centuries their descendants ruled over the Catholic majority of Ireland. This Protestant Ascendancy monopolized not only land and political power but also education and science. Trinity College Dublin, Ireland's only university until the mid-nineteenth century, was a Protestant seminary. In a country marred by poverty and divided by religion, Trinity created an internationally renowned school of mathematics. The promotion of mathematics, I argue, depended on the divisive political context.;I trace the steady rise of mathematics in Ireland in science, education and industry from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century. But rather than read this progression as inevitable, I look at the reasons that specific people had for adopting mathematics in particular places and at particular times. Those who promoted the new mathematical techniques were almost exclusively members of the Protestant Ascendancy. Their motivations for increasing the reach of mathematics depended on their belief in the power of mathematics to justify their political claims. They chose particular mathematical methods and elaborated philosophies of mathematics that they believed to be consistent with their religious and political beliefs.;To demonstrate the contingent and controversial aspects of mathematics in Ireland, I trace the changing political and scientific strategies of Irish mathematicians through a number of important events including William Petty's creation of political arithmetic in the seventeenth century, George Berkeley's attack on Newtonian natural philosophy in the early eighteenth century, John Brinkley's introduction of French mathematical techniques in the late eighteenth century, Bartholomew Lloyd's reform of Trinity's mathematical curriculum in the 1830s, William Rowan Hamilton, Humphrey Lloyd and James MacCullagh's work on the wave theory of light in the 1830s and 1840s, William Rowan Hamilton's creation of quaternions in the 1840s, Trinity's establishment of an engineering school in the 1840s, George Francis Fitzgerald's work on electromagnetism in the late nineteenth century and Trinity's recent efforts to play an active role in Irish economic development in the 1990s.