I heard this morning that Richard Hamilton passed away yesterday. 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 is best known for his work on the Ricci flow (see for instance this textbook). This was the basis for a program to prove the Poincare conjecture using methods of geometric analysis, a program that was brought to fruition by Grigori Perelman. When Perelman came to lecture at Columbia on this, I was sitting next to Richard at the back. He was paying close attention and afterwards told me that Perelman’s new ideas were impressive. He kept his distance though from the Perelman outline of a proof, trying to find instead a route to a proof using his own methods rather than Perelman’s Alexandrov space techniques. As far as I know though, this wasn’t ever successful and the Perelman outline was ultimately turned into a detailed and rigorously checked proof.
I often got the chance to talk to him over the years, sometimes at the daily math department tea, sometimes because he needed help since he had again spilled coffee and destroyed yet another laptop. This was always an entertaining experience, whether he was talking about mathematics, the joys of chasing women and spending time at his place in Hawaii, or politics (more right-wing than the median academic, but very anti-Trump). He enthusiastically enjoyed mathematics and life in general.
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.
