Richard S. Hamilton

Richard Hamilton is one of those mathematicians whose name you might not immediately recognize, but whose work quietly reshaped the entire landscape of geometry. He invented Ricci flow — this beautifully intuitive idea of letting a curved space "smooth itself out" over time, like heat diffusing through metal — and spent decades developing it into a serious analytical machine. When Perelman used that machine to finally crack the Poincaré Conjecture, one of the biggest unsolved problems in all of mathematics, Hamilton was the intellectual foundation the whole thing rested on. He won the Veblen Prize, the Clay Research Award, the Shaw Prize, and the Steele Prize, and honestly every one of those was deserved. Princeton trained him, Columbia kept him, and the math world is genuinely poorer for losing him in September 2024.

Name (English)

Richard S. Hamilton

Name (Japanese)

リチャード・S・ハミルトン

Reading

りちゃーど・S・はみるとん

Born

December 19, 1943 – September 29, 2024

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Sagittarius / Goat

Origin

Cincinnati, Ohio, United States

Occupation

mathematician / university teacher

High school

Walnut Hills High School

University

Princeton University

Awards & achievements

• 1996 Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry
• 2011 Shaw Prize
• 2003 Clay Research Award
• 2011 The Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences
• 2009 Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research

Motto

Private

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AA%E3%83%81%E3%83%A3%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3%83%BBS%E3%83%BB%E3%83%8F%E3%83%9F%E3%83%AB%E3%83%88%E3%83%B3

Tags

• Ohio
• mathematician
• university teacher

Last updated

2026-06-02

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.