I heard this morning that Richard Hamilton passed away yesterday early this morning. He was a renowned figure in geometric analysis, and a faculty member here at Columbia since 1998. In terms of mortality, the last year or two at the Columbia math department have been grim ones, as we’ve lost five senior faculty at relatively young ages: Igor Krichever at age 72, Henry Pinkham at age 74, Lars Nielsen at age 70, Walter Neumann just last week at age 78, and now Hamilton at age 81.
Richard wrote a short autobiographical piece about himself at the time he was awarded the Shaw Prize in 2011, available here. There’s an interview conducted by his Columbia colleague John Morgan here. Just a couple months ago, Richard was award the Basic Science Lifetime award in Mathematics. You can watch his lecture given in Beijing at the time here.
Richard shared with my four other colleagues that have recently passed away a truly generous outlook on life and other people, very much the opposite of some negative stereotypes of academics as narrow and competitive, hostile to their colleagues and institution. I’ll miss him, as I miss the others we have recently lost.
Update: Frank Calegari has some memories of Walter Neumann here.
Thank you for posting your recollections of Richard Hamilton. I only know of him through his groundbreaking work on Ricci flow, but now I must dig a bit deeper to understand his great contributions.
I remember Richard Hamilton and S. – T. Yau working on Ricci flow all weekend long, every weekend in the Harvard math department when I was a beginning graduate student. It is a terrible loss. I regularly refer to Hamilton’s thesis for a more prosaic result: irreducibility of Hurwitz schemes of covers of higher genus curves (Hurwitz proved irreducibility in genus zero).
By the way, I learned of this part of Hamilton’s thesis through Walter Neumann (another sad loss). This part of his thesis was never published, although the same result does also appear in an article of Gabai — Kazez and in Joan Birman’s “Braids” volume.
Richard was generous with his time and talents. Any new idea made his eyes light up and he’d approach the blackboard with a smile, a spring in his step, and a “let’s see if it works!” He will be missed.
I have known Richard Hamilton for over 40 years. Just a year or so ago, we held a conference at the Simons center in honor of the 40th anniversary of his epic work on Ricci flow. He was his usual very animated, very insightful, and very fun-loving self. I will miss him very much.
It is in large part thanks to Hamilton’s work on Ricci, that Perelman was able to vanquish the Poincare Conjecture. Perelman would have been the first to say as much, but since he’s not in these comments we’ll have to say it for him.
RIP.